Laure Vigna: Le cru et le cuit
Mon Cheri, Brussels
January 2017

 

How does one digest an image?
What time of day is best to take it in? Alone or accompanied?

Here’s how to start:

Rice paper, plain or printed, immerse it in hot water. Add gelatin, spices, food coloring, not for taste but to play with depth of surface. Developing trays of water and pigment – soon it will reveal the delicacy of layers of transparence mixed with colored transparence.

Like all good recipes, there is time and and there is material. The rice paper dries, assumes volume.

The rice paper might break. That’s ok. Take those fragments and start the process over, and this time it will be stronger and different. Return to malleable and reintroduce and re-assimilate and re-think.

Layer upon layer of these fragile instants. All that is there is merely that moment’s presentation of an instantaneous arrangement of cells, caught in a cycle of transformation.

That’s how to digest an image, with the knowledge that this is just the current arrangement of materials and ideas. It’s not done or undone, it’s both at the same time. Let it digest itself, the only constant is matter.
See what was exterior become interior, a transformation of Other into Self.