We live in a world of clichés and we don't even know what an image is because we don't know how to see an image, and we don't know how to see what's in an image.
Gilles Deleuze

a critical text written by curator Giuliana Prucca and published by AVARIE, Paris 2018

10 pages
size 21 x 21 cm  
b/w image
digital print
english

Peter Downsbrough.
The utopia of the subversive image

As plastic objects, books are mobile constructions that invite us to reflect on the transition from horizontal to vertical, from linear to three-dimensional and on movement interpreted as converging time and space. Hence, they allow deambulation between the pages, in which words and graphic signs confer dynamism to the sequence of photographs and film stills. They are also architectural projections, the editing of which varies according to how the reader connects words, images and volumes to reassemble their sense, which therefore remains always open.

This circulation is possible thanks to the discontinuity of the space, made of interruptions and intervals. The connective element is in fact a disjunction – Or – that gives the whole thing an intermittent, suspended, broken rhythm. The Option offered between one book and another from a unique edition creates an interdependence, which makes one perceive the absence of something that is elsewhere, dispersed, but makes it possible to imagine, and perhaps even desire, its presence. Preserving their autonomy, books intersect, meet and divide at once, while they follow a guiding line which delimits the space in-between them and makes the void no longer absolute and infinite, but tangible and shareable, as leporello's form shows. Here, emptiness is an interstice, an additional place existing only if words, images, letters and books separate, an intrinsic value that often occupies the centre of books, a metaphor of the image's abstraction and utopia.

Downsbrough's work is a quiet subversion, showing the reader-spectator a mirror to rediscover the power of action and the value of difference through repetition. If the utopian image is a subversive image, subversion is in turn utopian yet continuously desirable. What is truly independent and intrinsic to man, is the dream, the imagination: one cannot help dreaming, one cannot stop imagining even in the awareness that the image will remain the incomplete and fragmentary sign of an absent space.

Peter Downsbrough (New Jersey, 1940) lives in Brussels. His work – which encompasses sculpture, graphics, photography, video, film, and books – presents complex associations between architecture, text and typography. Associated with such major art international movements as minimal art, conceptual art and visual poetry, he has been exhibiting regularly in the United States and Europe since 1972. He is represented by: Angels, Barcelona; Martine Aboucaya and GdM, Paris; Krakow Witkin Gallery, Boston; Thomas Zander, Cologne.

Giuliana Prucca (lives in Paris and Berlin) publisher and curator, founder and art director of the independent press AVARIE. Phd in French Literature and Visual Arts, she is the author of an essay on Antonin Artaud and translator of artists' texts, such as Yves Klein, Gina Pane and Antoine d'Agata's. Professor of image analysis and performer butoh, she has curated several exhibitions, among which From static oblivion: Ion Grigorescu – Minimum Lab, Palermo, during Manifesta12 (2018); Noctiluca – The Others Fair, Ex-Carcere Le Nuove, Turin (2015) and I do not want to disappear silently into the night: Katrien de Blauwer – Fotoleggendo, Officine Fotografiche, Rome (2015).

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all texts © Giuliana Prucca | AVARIE