FABRICE SCHNEIDER
SPAREWHEEL
BRUSSELS, FEBRUARY 16th - 25th
The Sparewheel gate is capricious. It resists. You don't go through it, you break it down. It's important to imagine the state in which the solitary visitor finds themself after such an outpouring of energy. They immediately realize they have a body. This body faces this:
This is not entirely true. Standing in front of the blind white wall is a smiling figure. It's the artist himself, waiting for you.
This space, which in all likelihood was once a garage, is longer than it is wide, with a high ceiling. The ceiling has been lowered and softened. A wooden frame, with sheets of beige onion skin paper as canvas, floats above the heads. Its rectangular grid seems to be reflected in the layout of the floor tiles, which also once had a definite colour. Light brown? The aggressive neon light is muted, the white of the walls less conspicuous. Aluminium frames, hung at the correct height, line the two facing walls. Their size is not exactly standard, about thirty centimetres by forty something? A colour photograph emerges from under a pane of glass itself covering a salmon-coloured passepartout (if salmon were yellow). As the images are of different formats, the passepartouts obey.
In an adjoining room, where the light is fully accusatory this time, you will be confronted with a square table, the anthracite colour of which will remind you of some administration, a provincial media library or the study room of some secondary school. On this table rest small vertical grey tubes of different heights and diameters. They are stuck together in an arc. Their configuration is suggestive of many things, all of which seem to agree on one point: their scale is not respected. On a nearby wall hangs a net, typical of beach games. Its contents are reassuring: rakes, buckets and other plastic shovels. What's special about these games is that they're grey. Grey-pvc-pipe-waste-water. We know happier childhoods. Another wall, another impression. Once again, an aluminium frame and its mat. A passepartout that looks like a tour de force, its side edges seeming to merge into those of the frame. The image it contains is of a crushed man in his office. The panoramic view, the attention to detail and the matting contrast with the mediocrity of the situation. Finally, after climbing a few steps, you could try to decipher the contents of a postcard stuck to the back of the same onion skin paper used for the false ceiling. This paper is mounted on a frame and has the dimensions of a small painting. It is therefore hung on the wall. The contents of the postcard were revealed to us: once again, Jehovah's Witnesses were communicating excessively.
THE PICTURES
Yes, the framed photographs come from the book "Questions Young People Ask - Answers That Work, 2 volumes", published and distributed free of charge by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, the legal entity used by Jehovah's Witnesses. This information is given by the artist (there is no information sheet) who pulls the book out of a bottomless pocket. Would you like to run away? Remember the difficulties encountered when opening the door. And why should you? The photos are surprisingly elaborate. Intriguing, even. You can assume that they usually come with captions, but they're obviously missing, so you play the game of reading the image. A floral dress, an auburn carpet, rolled-up sleeves, a clenched fist, a foreground and a background, the frame of a door within the frame of the image. More than Jehovah's Witnesses, it makes you think of an instructional book on photography. The compositions are, by definition, entirely artificial. They are reminiscent of American television series filmed in a studio. It is never day or night, hot or cold. The air barely circulates. By contagion, even the rare scenes shot outdoor seem unreal, and we fear for the health of the actors who have suddenly been taken out of their sterilised jars. Similarly, the photographs in the exhibition oscillate between a studio shot, a photograph of a play whose title has been lost, and a still image taken from an untitled film. But several things remain certain:
1. Each image depicts feelings presented as negative: shame, apathy, sorrow, depression, suffering.
2. The images are at least thirty years old.
3. The actors or models playing the teenagers were also over thirty years old at the time of the events.
4. The photos on display have been enlarged by a factor of 5.
REFRAMING
My description of this exhibition resembles that of a fair and its distorting mirrors. The exaggerations are real, but there is nothing grotesque about them. Rather than dripping out of the frame, the images are held in place. This is not entirely true either. They actually make two movements. They are enlarged to the point where their pattern is visible, but within a frame that prevents it from expanding uncontrollably. A sort of bonsai tree, perhaps? Just like the thirty-something adults who play the virginal, beardless teenagers in the photos on show here and in American teen movies. The theatricality that, in a sense, was already at work in Fabrice Schneider's previous series of photographs, is treated differently here. It embraces the return to favour of the frame and the passepartout. They set the scene for images that are somewhat out of date. The passepartout resembles a miniature stage, or at least the frame created by its curtains. The effect is bizarrely comic, reminiscent of its much less subtle counterpart in the film "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" (1989).
I suppose it was the last time such special effects, borrowed to the theatre or opera, were adapted for the cinema. Gigantic sets now replaced by green backgrounds. In cinema, the presence of shrunken or enlarged human bodies seems old-fashioned these days. It's easier to imagine living in a parallel world where the scales remain unchanged. Only the interactions are altered. So perhaps the first impression we had when we pushed open the door to Sparewheel wasn't so disconnected from the exhibition itself? The - accidental - sensation of having a body. Apart from the surly door, there's the lowered ceiling and the two rows of frames that lead straight to a bare wall, or to the artist. Look at the photographs and you'll get the impression that you're looking at scale models trapped in unpleasant situations. If we had to force the point rather crudely, we could call them sculptures rather than photographs. Flat sculptures like collages, for example. A disturbing effect of patching can thus be achieved. Characters appear to have been added in post-production, while lights emerge from the darkness to illuminate a face. However, the most striking detail for me remains the completely motionless hands. While the bodies barely mime the idea of an action, the hands remain petrified in pantomime expressions that have no narrative meaning. Perhaps the most disturbing thing is not living in an eighties television series designed by Jehovah's Witnesses, or even building sandcastles with grey buckets on the beaches of the North Sea. Rather, it is the emptiness that stands behind each of the frozen hands. The term unheimlich is perhaps the most appropriate here. This image bank of empty signifiers resembles a haunted house. The fear comes not from a headless ghost but from being overcome by aphasia.