Manon Bejuit

From home movies to old camcorders, she explores the stories that things carry and how to make them last a little longer.

For several years, I have been working from images that I collect: home movies, videos shot with various camcorders, leisure or holiday footage. I assemble them, move them around, set them against one another. The different cameras are like brushes to me: each produces its own material, light, color and way of looking.

At Rocabella, I will film with my different cameras, but I will also take the time to write, to take notes, to observe and to gather sensations linked to the place. These materials will feed directly into my painting.

The open sea interests me because it is both a real space and a projection surface. You can see it, perceive it and imagine it all at once. I take in the sea with my eyes. The horizon opens a space onto which memories, stories and images can be projected, along with everything that might lie beyond.

Rocabella interests me precisely for this position: experiencing the open sea with my bottom planted on the shore. I look for situations that impose certain conditions on the gaze and that, precisely because of these constraints, produce images or associations I could not produce anywhere else. These images will become the direct material for my painting in the studio.

In the studio, projection becomes a pictorial working tool: it lets the shifts between flow and pause appear, which painting then holds, displaces or erases.

For me, painting is not a stopped image. It offers a moment of pause. It resists the flow. It forces the gaze to circulate differently, to wander, to return, to hesitate. The aim will not be to paint a filmed image, but to move it into painting, working with repetition, superimposition, intervals, variations of light and color, and the gaps that appear from one image to the next.

I believe painting can, in turn, produce this suspension of the gaze that I experienced in front of a paused VHS tape. Some places resist pictoriality while others give way completely. One slides between figuration and abstraction spontaneously and intuitively. Sometimes the material can take over from representation. This residency represents for me a time of research as much as a time of creation. A time when it becomes possible to slow down enough to observe what appears when images—and perhaps our gaze as well—also take a little vacation.