Catalogue Nam June Paik Award 2006 (06/12/2007)
"Singular Images" - Author: Solange Farkas
The Work of Marcellvs L. is extremely particular, his œuvre possesses the actuality to reproduce itself in a context of intense imagetic profusion. His very experimental production that belongs to the electronic arts’ universe attracts attention through its radical concept and through the intensity with which it associates philosophical concepts and the electronic image.
His work places itself in a zone of undiscernibility, which turns it inapprehensible by this or that audiovisual genre. It operates between documentary and experimental video, between the objective and the subjective and “between” these genres; it creates its own discursive universe, provoking extraordinary thoughts.
His videos relate themselves almost always to events and people that find themselves distant from the cameras and that do not know of their presence. Almost without recourse to editing, they show long sequences in black and white of anonymous people and their quotidian and that are subtly revealed through the operation of the digital zoon, a recurrent practice in the œuvre of the artist. However, instead of revealing reality, they end up turning it into an invention, a mirage.
The fixed camera offers a banal image, homemade, precarious: A man walks slowly, faraway. He comes closer whilst the camera follows him through a zoom out almost unperceivable. A flooding forms a river that crosses the street where he walks. The zoom turns the scene into a shaky, impressionist scene.