With Non mi ricordo il titolo, the Artericambi Gallery presents Christelle Lheureux’s first solo exhibition in Italy, curated by Marinella Paderni. Fascinated by the filmic image and its ghostly, evocative quality, the French artist offers to her videos’ viewers the experience of a dissociation between image and its content, between visual perception and imagination, illustrating the omnipresent fractures in visual linguistic codes, contemporary discourses, and interpersonal communication. Christelle Lheureux loves to play with the language of the image, the history of film, dialogues and their symbolic value for reawakening the concealed strangeness under the surface of representations.
In Non mi ricordo il titolo, Christelle Lheureux previews a black-and-white video of the same name (co-produced by Artericambi) in which she imagines the history of an impossible cinema. Inspired by the cinematographic masterpieces of the Fifties and Sixties, particularly by Italian Neorealism and the French Nouveau Roman, the artist creates an imaginary, completely mental narration – de-structured in images and dialogues – a filmic collage without a story where flash-backs of cinematographic excerpts emerge. As after a night spent watching films, the mental residuals of those visions – together with nocturnal dreams and individual memories – collide in a “space open to the imagination of the spectator” and to every possible narrative phantom. This phantom is symbolized by two protagonists, professional doubles of Marcello Mastroianni and Ingrid Bergman, that act as ghosts without an identity in a work of reflection upon the filmic image and its value as a simulacrum of the world.
A series of photographic diptychs and several black-and-white photographs present the two protagonists of the video on the lunar and cathartic landscape of the island of Stromboli, where the video was filmed.
