Vicente de Mello: Pli selon pli

Offset, varied dimensions

The title of the work evokes the piece of the same name by Pierre Boulez, composed between 1957 and 1962. The sound of the piece suggested to the artist a photographic sequence of flashes emulsifying films veiled in brief and striking light interference. Mello executed the idea by photographing lampposts in Warsaw, Poland. Observed against a neutral sky, these objects are reduced to a line, looking like drawings. By duplicating them in photos and printing them in lambe-lambes, the artist constructed a kind of erratic musical score, proposing a modulation of forms with different rhythms, as in Athos Bulcão's tile panels.