AN INTERVIEW WITH ÉTIENNE DE MASSY BY SOLVEY JOHNSGAARD
This summer I’ve had the opportunity to familiarize myself with the artwork of experimental filmmaker Étienne de Massy. While it’s been a difficult time to form and maintain connections with unstable technologies causing disarray, I can say it’s been a privilege to learn from Étienne’s nuanced perspectives through artwork, conversations, and written responses about his life and artistic process that can be read in the interview below. As a short introduction, I’d like to begin with a macro glimpse into what I’ve learned from engaging with Étienne and his artwork thus far…
What I have often thought of as the tension (and subsequent magnetism) inherent to the artistic process, Étienne has aptly called torsion: the twisting of an object due to an applied torque. While his first language is French, he digs up these gems of English phrasing through a patient process of translation. His body of work conveys that while production never starts from a clean slate, human consciousness can be greatly enhanced through processes of reframing, rearranging and reshaping experience. A gem previously obscured by shadow scintillates with a shift in perspective.
While often expressing portraits of loneliness and bodily disintegration, Étienne’s inspired sensitivity for color, texture, and syncopation reveal sensorially dynamic worlds that expand beyond mundane violence as purely psychological subject matter. Driven by more universal mysteries of human experience, oppositional frames are rhythmically paired through elusive forces of light and motion; form coalesces with shapelessness, impermanence marks rebirth, and lucid materiality unfolds into unknown territories. His frequent depiction of individual isolation and environmental diffusion could be viewed as a figurative armature for the more elemental abstractions to take form.
Étienne doesn’t cite the 20th century experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage as a particular influence, however, I feel there is a strong resonance between their works. I am reminded of one of our earliest conversations where Étienne expressed a need to be constantly surprised in his process, and was therefore well suited to the immediacy of the video camera. Brakhage and de Massy are both noted for their musical poetics expressed largely through optical sensibilities. To contemplate this comparison, I’d like to close with an opening from Brakhage’s 1963 book, Metaphors on Vision:
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of "Green"? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable graduations of color. Imagine a world before the "beginning was the word."
—Stan Brakhage
This summer I’ve had the opportunity to familiarize myself with the artwork of experimental filmmaker Étienne de Massy. While it’s been a difficult time to form and maintain connections with unstable technologies causing disarray, I can say it’s been a privilege to learn from Étienne’s nuanced perspectives through artwork, conversations, and written responses about his life and artistic process that can be read in the interview below. As a short introduction, I’d like to begin with a macro glimpse into what I’ve learned from engaging with Étienne and his artwork thus far…
What I have often thought of as the tension (and subsequent magnetism) inherent to the artistic process, Étienne has aptly called torsion: the twisting of an object due to an applied torque. While his first language is French, he digs up these gems of English phrasing through a patient process of translation. His body of work conveys that while production never starts from a clean slate, human consciousness can be greatly enhanced through processes of reframing, rearranging and reshaping experience. A gem previously obscured by shadow scintillates with a shift in perspective.
While often expressing portraits of loneliness and bodily disintegration, Étienne’s inspired sensitivity for color, texture, and syncopation reveal sensorially dynamic worlds that expand beyond mundane violence as purely psychological subject matter. Driven by more universal mysteries of human experience, oppositional frames are rhythmically paired through elusive forces of light and motion; form coalesces with shapelessness, impermanence marks rebirth, and lucid materiality unfolds into unknown territories. His frequent depiction of individual isolation and environmental diffusion could be viewed as a figurative armature for the more elemental abstractions to take form.
Étienne doesn’t cite the 20th century experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage as a particular influence, however, I feel there is a strong resonance between their works. I am reminded of one of our earliest conversations where Étienne expressed a need to be constantly surprised in his process, and was therefore well suited to the immediacy of the video camera. Brakhage and de Massy are both noted for their musical poetics expressed largely through optical sensibilities. To contemplate this comparison, I’d like to close with an opening from Brakhage’s 1963 book, Metaphors on Vision:
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of "Green"? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable graduations of color. Imagine a world before the "beginning was the word."
—Stan Brakhage
pix (045) : 2021
haïku database
pix (047) : 2021
haïku database
SOLVEY JOHNSGAARD
c) 2020