Thursday, March 13 – Sunday, March 30
The Water’s ritual, Rishi’s upanayanam
Véronique RIZZO
Room Gilbert-Gaillard, 2 rue Saint Pierre
Opening hours:
Tuesday to Saturday, 1pm to 7pm
Sunday from 2pm to 6pm
Free access
This post is also available in: Français (French)
The work:
Bengali ‘s impressions, a night on the banks of the river Ganga. In the background of the village of Bhadreswar, the cosmic river flows and seeps into the village and the forest in small trickles. Tomorrow will be the ceremony’s upanayanam for young Rishi. He will grieve for his childhood for enter in a new phase of life. He will receive the pilgrim’s staff and the prince’s robe. The community accompanies and surrounds him in this symbolic passage.
The night before, I filmed the women collecting the sacred water in copper jars. The fire is lit to summon the elements and receive their blessings. Like asparas of water, earth, air and fire, their songs mingle softly with the sounds of the forest and the resonating conch shell. The scene reminded me of a tale described in mystical Hindu poems. It surprised and delighted me so much that I wanted to pay tribute to it.
The artist:
Véronique Rizzo lives and works in Marseille. She has been exhibiting in France and abroad since 1997.
Véronique Rizzo’s practice follows the original path, of a pictoriality that explores as much the narratives and territories of the object “painting”, as those of the experimental video movie. The instability of her motives blows up the obvious aims of the styles, assuming their dialectical contradictions. Her reflexive approach on history of forms makes them vibrate in the hope of an utopian romantic projection, which would be a radical return to sensation. The hybridity of his work is based on the unanticipated coexistences of abstractions, traces of multiple shocks of images, as well as hermetic fictions. Her work focuses on the representation of hallucinatory and ambiguous spaces that act, as revealing of a psycho-sensory relation of consciousness to spatiality, and to image as environmental space. The color, diluted in the echoes of the sound, spreads its materiality and the movement of the forms immerses the spectator in a salutary hypnosis.
Artiste’s website: https://www.documentsdartistes.org/artistes/rizzo/repro.html
ARTIST'S PORTRAIT:
Pour en savoir plus...
Interview by Fanny Bauguil (VIDEOFORMES relay teacher)
- How would you describe this installation? What do we see? What do we hear? What do we do?
The installation is a dyptic projection of two paintings. The projection formats are two vertical 16:9. The one on the right is a night scene near a small lake, where Indian women in saris light a fire by the water and perform a mysterious ritual. The other shows a flow of intermingling colors, symbolically representing the water of the Ganges, the river that flows close to the village.
- What is it about?
The preparation of a ceremony of passage, the upanayanam, for a young Brahmin boy who has just turned 14. The ceremony is organized by the family with the help of the village, and is intended to accompany the young boy in this symbolic moment when his adult life begins and he bids farewell to the world of childhood. The next day, his head is shaved, a symbol of rigor and resilience. Water from the Ganges, collected the day before, will be poured as a blessing. It’s about the great sacred river, a moment in the life of a community in a small village in Bengal. About magic, the sacred, nature.
- Is this the first time this installation has been presented to the public? Can you tell us a little about the process involved in creating the work?
This is the second time the installation has been presented to the public. The first time was in February 2024 in Auxerre, at the invitation of the Hors Cadre association, which showed it through a double night-time projection through windows overlooking the street.
It was this invitation that triggered the development of the piece, as the format of the windows corresponded to the format of the women’s scene filmed unexpectedly with a smartphone during the summer of 2023. I thought of the symbolic representation of the Ganges in the second window to form the dyptic, reminiscent of certain pictorial configurations. The images and sound captured were very raw. I worked on the material of the images to give them a quality, a thickness, a density.
- Which artists (in all fields) or, more generally, which art forms have inspired your creative process, and what references, if any, do you allude to in this installation?
Harold Budd’s music is very important and accompanied me throughout the development of the piece. The spirit of this album, “The Pavillon of dreams”, whose title track is “Bismillahi ‘Rahmani ’Rahim” (an ode to the great whole), coincided perfectly with what I wanted to address in the piece: a sense of calm, the rightness of man in his environment, a universal benevolence.
I’m influenced by meditative abstract painting and the work on color in space of the great abstract painters like Rothko, Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler…
- What are the difficulties, constraints, challenges… encountered during its development?
The difficulties were mainly technical, as the quality of the shots was mediocre and I had to turn them into something sublime. So I worked frame by frame, on the intensity and ratio of colors, the stretching out in time of the source images, the transitions of the collages of different moments, the special effects I added to the real shots. This took a lot of time, as every detail had to be parameterized, and the computer needed a lot of computing time. It was a challenge to do something with images shot on the fly in unprepared conditions.
- Can you give us one or more web addresses where we can see your work?
https://www.documentsdartistes.org/artistes/rizzo/repro.html
https://vimeo.com/veroniquerizzo
- A few keywords that would fit in well with your installation?
Nature, sacred, calm, voluptuousness, benevolence, natural elements, magic, coming-of-age, community.
- A few words about your artistic career? When did you first become interested in digital art? Do you manage to make a living from your creative activity?
I became interested in digital art in 2001. I have several sources of income, including teaching. No, I can’t make a living from it in the strict sense.