EXHIBITIONS / REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PRESENT

09.02.2006 to 25.02.2006

Two years ago I visited Marcel Proust’s reconstructed bedroom at Le Musée Carnavalet in Paris.  The effect on me, of seeing the objects that he had lived with whilst writing Remembrance of Things Past, was profound.  Here was the coat he wore, a very small man.  Here was a porcelain figurine and the desk that he wrote his novel from.  I surreptitiously took three photographs.

Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, with reference to the space of the photograph, said, “In this habitually unary space, occasionally (but alas all too rarely) a “detail” attracts me.” This detail he called the “punctum”.  He also said that “However lightening–like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion.  This power is often metonymic.”

One of the photographs I had taken located such a “detail” for me within the porcelain figurine.  This object did not feel fixed it tantalized me.  Every time I looked at the photograph I was drawn to it and it reminded me of the memories that it holds.  As well as this, the photograph cued the memory of gazing at an object that Proust gazed upon.  

I am moved to paint the object in the photograph because I want to get closer to the memory time and memory space that it embodies.  Painting can be heightened perception.  To see things that are not visible with a cursory glance but to also see things with a cursory glance that cannot be seen in focus.  How does that object embody Proust and Proustian memory?  Proust believed that memory is by nature incomplete.  Moreover that it is essential to embrace imperfect, fleeting and disconnected images for true memory to occur.  That is my interest in painting this object in this photograph.

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