Le noeud coulant

1997 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
56,3 x 51,3 cm

On a piece of paper, the artist has traced two loops in black crayon and placed two eyes where the lines intersect. Cut out of the same photograph, the eyes belong to the same gaze. The first asset of a slip knot is its simplicity, it basically requires a small length of rope. This collage is “apragmatic drawing, a kind of instructions manual” (“ Paragraphes pour Jean-Luc Moulène ”, ibid.) of Moulène’s work and photographs. Indeed, doesn’t one commonly speak of the photographer’s gaze? The slip knot could be a “a sort of vision’s hieroglyph”: the eye is the node of everything, the optic nerve is the common thread, the vector of information. This collage questions our gaze which cannot embrace both eyes at once (literally staring in the eyes), which is the point made in the series Les filles d’Amsterdam (photographs of prostitutes which place face and sex organs on the same level). In an interview, the artist analyzes his work by proposing a scenario that activates drawing: “in fact it is the question of the figure. Tracing is always a sharing act, something quite surprising occurs when the line loops back: this reflexivity produces the figure. Then one notices that by pulling the lines to separate the eyes, at a certain point they become stuck; and if one separates other lines then the two eyes end up stuck to one another. It is as if these eyes were rolling around in their own orbits. […] As such, I believe that thought is outside, that there is no room for it in the flesh. The other, social space, outside our bodies: that is what enables us to think”.

After training in literature and working in advertising, Jean-Luc Moulène became known in the 1990s for his ‘documentary’ photographic practice. His images could be considered as studies of natural and cultural phenomena; the Objets de grève ( Strike objects) series (1999) documents objects made in factories during social protests. Moulène uses the codes of media images and diverts them to liberate the gaze and produce a new imaginary. This poetic tactic is manifest in the series called Disjonctions , in which Moulène photographs still lives, portraits, daily urban scenes. The notion of disjunction, which can be interpreted in the grammatical sense (‘or’, ‘either… either…’) or in terms of logic (an alternative in a dilemma), is manifest in the image by the disunity of the elements in the composition. The artist is not just a photographer, he increasingly creates relations with drawing, sculpture, objects, texts and newspapers.