Georges H. Rabbath, The Better World, by Rebecca Russo, 2016

Videoinsight® Garden

The creation of the image that expresses movement is the modality that conventional representation has always adopted. Founded on the principle of contiguity between character and environment and on the function of the narrative instance, its nature subordinates the entire construction to the chains of cause and effect. The editing, inevitable, will be hidden, invisible, functional to the story. The actions and gestures performed by the characters will take place in a coherent manner and in accordance with the general whole that guarantees a sense and total comprehensibility. This does not only happen in cinema: we could find the same peculiarities in traditional creations: pictorial and sculptural, photographic and theatrical. The image that, instead, knows how to unleash time, can emancipate the vision from any plot. While in the first case everything was in function of the narrative pretext, now every moment emanates a new intuition, opening up to empty environments, to unlimited and expanded spaces, to long waits, to non-places, to a landscape, existential or biological suspension. Fluidity becomes the protagonist, the composure of the polarities of signifiers gives way: the characters disperse in the environment, placing themselves in opposition to it, demonstrating their perpetual extraneousness. Creative power is untied from the power of linearity: the narration offers other utopian solutions. Here the better world is born, the liberating perception of a way out: not only a golden age, but a clear declination and sharp formulation of the future, a self-fulfilling premonition. Capturing, at the same time, the subject and his or her torment: the hints of all the time passed and the mystery of birth, the enigma of becoming. This is the task of the portraitist, the artist’s battle. Aesthetic practice continually creates images, outlines effigies and colors, crosses the boundaries of universes: in writing, in music, in figurative art, in the body of the actor or of a performing agent. This creation has nothing to do with fantasy or memories that can be verbalized in a univocal and definitive way, with necessarily sensitive determinations. On the contrary, the figure can be understood and perceived in the nakedness of a concept, in the feeling of a prediction, in the purity of a content, in the functioning of a formula: it is the suggestion that remains imprinted in the depths of the brain, that furrows our unconscious. Photography, as a transcription of light, always gives us an illusion of truth a priori, requiring a suspension of disbelief. Although it cannot be defined in terms of verisimilitude, since each shot presupposes a choice of shots and implies a point of view, it requires prior assent. Paintings and video art, over the course of the last century, have sucked up its illumination, assimilated its expressive capacity.
On Monday, April 11, 2016, inside Rebecca Russo’s Videoinsight® Garden, Georges H. Rabbath wandered around armed with his photographic lens. We would all have thought of a classic shooting session, embellished by the talent of the author, always attentive to the extemporaneous relationships between individuality and environmental, historical, relational circumstances. The participants would have had to walk through the fascinating garden, thinking about their particular and unique idea of ​​a better world in harmony with the instances and supporting structures of Rebecca Russo’s Videoinsight® Method, find a vital balance in a precise point between trees and shrubs and, finally, let themselves be immortalized by the artist’s attentive gaze. Georges himself, instead, amplified his own experience: he “improved” his relationship with the other, with the subject of his desire, formally and conceptually penetrating the content theme of the experiment. His works worked on a time deprived of space and enriched by movement: the place became a scenography, an integral part of the immersion in a cosmos of accomplished energies. The stillness of the shot has been extended into a sequence of tablaux vivants lasting a few seconds: Georges has shot short videos, films that will become, perhaps, series of still images, prints. The result, for now, is the sharing of short films without a plot: the thread that binds them is the biunivocal desire for another possibility, the perfection of a dialogue made of silence, breath and pure existence.

Ivan Fassio