O SOLE MIO. David Ancelin & Les Editions Macumba Night club. Exhibition from 1 April to 3 May 2014 David Ancelin, the fictional image The history of screen…
O SOLE MIO. David Ancelin & Les Editions Macumba Night club. Exhibition from 1 April to 3 May 2014 David Ancelin, the fictional image The history of screen printing is already a long one, and David Ancelin is situated precisely within this Warholian heritage, with the difference that his images do not come from the media of the printed press or from advertising. He uses his camera to obtain an image which will then serve him as a model throughout a process of transfer to screen printing. Like the series of drawings By Night, begun in 2010, David Ancelin favours the gap between photography, whose medium is indexical, and its approximate rendering through painterly technique. Photography records a continuum of reality, while a screen print is the result of a process of mental transcription. Although his photographs bear a formal kinship with his drawings, one can assert that he constructs a fictional image insofar as the drawing takes from the photograph its lines, its tones and its forces while abandoning its dimension as a quotation of reality. The deserted urban settings appear as melancholy landscapes, at worst abandoned after a tragedy. The noir atmosphere created by David Ancelin is the fruit of the passage between his photographic universe, which records a point of view and a reality, and the drawing, which remembers and, through memory, builds a fictional reality. David Ancelin’s screen printing also makes the surprising choice of supports such as mirror or steel, in order to heighten the already blurred border between photography and painting. This technique has the merit of reinforcing the feeling of the uncanny, theorised by Freud as early as 1919, which gives the indexical image a destabilising power over the psyche. The absence of any context in the series Smog (2010-2013) and the solitude of the image are conducive to every most unavowable fantasy. An aeroplane in a cloudy sky, a boat lost in the middle of the ocean, an abandoned skiff, a wave come from nowhere: so many images of the void and of the absence of a world that seems to have withdrawn. The recent series Short Cuts (2013), screen printing on lacquered wood, presents instead many atmospheres and diverse places. The artist’s treatment of the initial image once again leaves room for all possible interpretations. Wet ground after the rain, or a contemporary, urban rereading of Monet’s Water Lilies kept at the Orangerie; the ripple of a blue and white pattern evoking as much an abandoned plastic bag as a rough sea; a reflection in water that echoes as much the history of Impressionist painting as that of contemporary photography, and notably Thomas Struth. Every possible fiction can be envisaged. Like the writer who nourishes his narrative from elements of reality, David Ancelin creates potential narratives from very real images. Across the diversity of his supports, he is also distinguished from the pop and more contemporary painters such as Rebecca Howe Quaytman, Christopher…
