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The suite “Look and Say” is a mathematical example of formal mechanics causing complexity. One starts with the number 1 and one reads that what one sees. One sees “one 1” , that which one writes 11. That is the second element of the suite. Stage after stage one arrives to a kind of a very complex big-bang, packed with unpredictable emergencies.The mathematician John Conway uses this suite as an argument in favour of the idea that the apparent complexity of the world, do not exclude a simple origin, even very simple. The contents of the DVD (10 minutes video) to which this text comes, make visible a mental space in the form of an atopique place. Different places in the world where I have had certain experiences (one place in the Queens, a supermarket and a Thracian temple in Bulgaria, the park of la Cambre in Brussels), are integrated in a unique and hybrid environment a compensatory place of utopian integration. In the photographic layers are insets of computer -animated virtual elements simulating physical forces. The main element is a field of virtual gravity and a series of collisions. That what is made visible are fragments of environment which in a recent past were part of my vision (exterior or interior) as peripheral elements with a catalysing capacity. For example, the flat trees which appears in the work were present every day in my visual field during my time as a student at La Cambre and also when I had become a teacher at the same school. Six months ago, just before starting the work on “Look and say” , I finished the work on a documentary film. I made virtual reconstructions based on the recent discoveries of the enormous cultural inheritance left by the Thraces one thousand five hundred years ago. We were the second team to enter under the enormous mound of the archaeological site discovered in Bulgaria a couple of months ago. In the ceilings were found frescos, not yet made known to the public, from which it was impossible to get different levels of reality (and which within three years will decorate the covers of art books in La Fnac), they are very lively, without hardly any oversimplified canonisation, makes you think of Giotto. (The discoveries concerning the thracian writing is reduced to some signs of a ambiguous aspect). The only way I have found (or rather rediscovered) to fully enjoy this kind of painting has been to develop my capacity in the extreme to assume a literary presence, to let myself be touched by the narrative intention itself. All this context has influenced the relation to the narration/writing of ”Look and say” to open the construction of a visual universe from a simple symbolic basis, even very simple and install a visual play of opening / closing according to a very extensive referential field. The title tries to catalyse a literary reception of the image, and attenuate a too strong narrative projection which is too reductive in relation to the potentiality of the plasticity of the figures. To go from four to six limbs and to a development in the axis Z (the depth axis) in the case of the centaur was a choice linked to a possible formula which opened up to another possible formula of experience. The symbolism of the centaur as a mythological incarnation of the idea of the hybrid nature of the artist was taken into consideration and joyfully assumed subsequently. The basic reference would be Bruce Newman. Curiously, since I’m doing a work exclusively based on digital techniques I find myself much more in line with a pictorial continuity several centuries long (at La Cambre, my work-shop had a greenbergien climate more than late and the paintings that I exposed at Ruben Forny were influenced by a certain American post- conceptualism : Reed, Lasker, Taffe. “Look and say” is fed with references from different periods of the history of painting. It’ s a work which does not escape nor try to escape a paradox linked to the production of moving images mostly by digital technology : that which is supposed to give an illusion of movement is experienced as still images during the production (and certain of these motionless images can even claim their autonomy). In the mind of the one who is producing it’ s a feed back of still images toward still images and the time, as far as intensity, always remains inaccessible. That which is accessible is the abundance of the possible linked to the interpolation of two motionless images but that stays an abundance of motionless images and a illusion of movement which, all the same, sometimes can establish a quite organic relation with the sound. I have listened several times to the work of John Taverner during the embryonic period of “ Look and say”. During six months I have been working without sound. One week ago I listened for the first time to the sound edited with the visual material. I was prepared for several days (even several weeks) of synchronisation. At the first listening I realised, with disbelief, that no synchronisation was needed. The phrases, the lengths, the accents were perfectly adjusted as by a mutual magnetic effect, and the whole was thereafter indissociable. Nicolas K. Nicolov Brussels, October 2005
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