Autoportrait d’Oro (2009, 63MB, 11:04 min)
There’s so much to commend in this quiet & beautiful piece I’m
unsure, really, where to start.
Three things though, stand out.
One is the modesty, the restraint, of the conception
-there’s no horrible look-at-how clever/shocking/whatever I am
about it, just some serious *looking*.
The camera looks and we look with it, with its (and with the artist’s,
although he’s there in the frame too) help.
Second, this austerity of visual means allows the sound to play a really
significant role in the piece. Again the work doesn’t trumpet its own innovative
qualities but quietly (pun intended) it does something quite radical with sound and
with our attention to same.
Lastly, it’s just very, very well made – that sort of still amibience is just so difficult to capture
effectively because digital video can be very unforgiving in that context – interlacing
& pretty much any sort of compression can generate horribly visible artefects.
Here, even in this pretty compressed version, there are none -it just looks like a
transparent window to a small epiphany…
Hats off then, three times.