Falling Pictures, solo show, 2011, curated by Géraldine Miquelot, Gallery 22,48m², Paris

Text written for the solo exhibition Falling Pictures, gallery 22,48 m², Paris, 2011

For her first solo exhibition , Caroline Delieutraz shows works from several years of research made by collected datas and tools from the Internet. Often linked to a living entity , the Internet would be guilty of images invasion in the “real” world. But this invasion began before, and the Internet has only intensified it .

The works shown in the exhibition “Falling Pictures” arise on the web and are in the real space and moving of the material world .

In our society of the image, the icons that ” fall ” interest the artist: these images appear, disappear and reappear in favor of successive reappropriations. They seem to be thousands to sweep every day in the news, and yet they are a handful to circulate on the Internet or elsewhere, to tell the great events of our world.

In the video projected on the website Falling pictures, Internet fails to broadcast the provided images is replaced by the characteristic red dot. Empty squares wander and fall gently containing no informations and giving it the materiality to the gallery space. The fall of the image and its defeat creates a new visual which in turn, associated with others, creates a “big picture”, an overview.

The video 300 avatars par défaut is broadcasted on an iPod and made with the images available for users of forums and other websites that have not chosen themselves an avatar. As a generic costume, these avatars include both the idea of ​​singularity among Internet users and the elements of the site that issues them. Many show the pattern of frontal portrait ID photos and the default avatar collection becomes a potential users file ready to serve as a global database.

From this collection of default avatars gathered from hundreds of websites and stored on the storage platform FlickR , the artist decided to broadcast it in the form of stamps – some of which were used the exhibition invitation, few pixels, a few square centimeters, two methods of communication and two ways of disseminating images. A kind of discreet new generation mail art.

Like the geometric logos that invade our daily lives, a constellation is an artificial form, even if it is created from existing stars. In La constellation de l’Hexagone, the picture printed on canvas is familiar, and yet it is different from the sky that we know. It is a true ” projection ” in the sense of mental construction that reproduces known patterns in unknown areas.

Another familiar image is presented in the exhibition: Venezzia_biennial_jn_3.jpg , initially discovered via Google Images and found as Wikipedia portal icon for contemporary art section. In the installation of the same image file name , Caroline Delieutraz shows us parts of her investigation : screenshots , poster produced by Wikipedia and interview with the author of the photo allows us to track the long and tortuous path of an image.

Designed specifiquely for the exhibition, the video Les Impénétrables is a work for the gallery’s website. Made by screenshots, the video shows 22.48 m2 space in different configurations, which evoke many special micro- narratives. 3dD quality recalls games as “escape the room” which topic is coming out of a closed space by collecting hidden clues in the decorative elements .

Caroline Delieutraz collects visual materials in the immediate environment, she manipulates and reworks to reveal playfully familiar but questionable character. Constructions and deconstructions resulting remind us of the true nature of the image, regardless of its use, on the Internet and elsewhere: a fiction.

Géraldine Miquelot