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25/1/2007

Jocelyn Cottencin

La Criee Centre for Contemporary Art, Rennes

Just a Walk

In 2005, la criee center for contemporary art initiated a program of European residencies in the cities of the Atlantic Arc. Just a Walk is a project created by the artist and graphic designer Jocelyn Cottencin that began in March 2005 and will continue its development through January 2007 between Bilbao, San Sebastian, Glasgow, Porto, Lisbon and Rennes. The project involves an Internet site, periods spent in residency, work sessions between artists and art professionals, and an exhibition.

Just a Walk is not in itself a direct questioning of European space, however the practice of displacement, with the connections it creates between ideas, individuals, artworks and structures, tests the notion of "territories". This notion must be considered at once in terms of its geographic reality and the imaginary and utopian dimension it generates, the relationship the individual constructs with her environment, a nation, an identity, a private or shared space.

Jocelyn Cottencin's artistic practice associates photography, video, installation and graphic design. Because of this, the work shown at la criee may seem very diverse, however rather than an installation of a group of works, what Just a Walk invites the visitor to discover is the relations that make up a coherent space for reflection with its own specific temporality. Here, images are not simply to be seen but to be experimented with in an environment of waiting, suspension or latency. Just a Walk creates a space dedicated for the ramifications of visual resonances. Like the hyperlinks of the Internet site where the exchanges of the artists participating in the residencies appear, the works presented in the exhibition refer back to and illuminate one another (in both the literal and metaphorical sense since they produce their own light). They function by stratification, circumvolution, dispersion or reassembly and offer multiple possible readings that one can make one's own for as many different discoveries of the same project.

Videos show scenes of human crowds and urban masses that at first seem easily identifiable but little by little uncertainty sets in. The contact that takes place between individuals - exchanges, frictions, encounters, avoidance - may influence our perception of their environment, unless it is the environment that gives new meaning to their behaviour. Views of natural sites, void of human presence, are displayed in large-format photographs and videos. Subtle details, such as variations in light, relief or atmospheric conditions, cause these spaces to take on an enigmatic presence.

Sentences written directly on the wall or in neon lettering are revealed through a font that proliferates until it becomes itself landscape. The graphics are in resonance with the meaning of the proposition, since Jocelyn Cottencin’s work as a graphic designer is indissociable from his artistic practice. In other photographs, our attention focuses on beings engaged in concrete physical actions such as walking, or, on the contrary, lost in thought, unconscious of their bodies. The actions here are not defined in terms of their purpose (the possibility of a narrative is left to the viewer) but rather in terms of flux and rhythms.

At the heart of Jocelyn Cottencin's creative process is an abandonment of control over the gaze in order to attempt to create images that contain something other than what they show us: another place, a different temporality… Beyond the contemplation they originally provoke, Jocelyn Cottencin's works escape us. Often imposing but never spectacular, they leave room for doubt and uncertain perception. Through these unstable situations, through the slowness of a movement, the roundness of a form, a critical position emerges that resists all forms of facile seduction, and all claims to authoritarian truth.

Opening Friday, 26 January, 6:00 p.m. at the CCNRB / 7:00 p.m. at la criee

La Criee - Center for Contemporary Art
place Honore' Commeurec - Rennes
Admission free
Tuesday to Friday from 12 p.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday from 2:00 p.m. to 7 p.m.

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