GRAPH, 2003

When the spectator discovers …Graph, he is first confronted with an imposing machinery, exposed for its own sake, in no way concealed: an architecture of metal tubes placed on the ground, two long rails, a floor made of balls of scattered clay, a mobile trolley, an electric motor, a control panel, a large horizontal plasma screen that   comes and goes making a lot of noise: here is heavy matter, movement, sounds; it’s quite impressive, even disturbing in some ways. Between engineering and do-it-yourself, Carlier puts into space not only an image, the result of a process, but also a machine, which he made himself. One quickly thinks of other imposing technical machinery, not devoid of aesthetics, of which Carlier’s piece seems a possible metaphor here: industrial metaphor of machine tools in an assembly line at the factory;  a cinematographic metaphor for the filming device of a tracking shot, with the rails and  the carriage; computer metaphor of the printer, which inscribes an image from the horizontal back and forth movements of its cassette, etc. But in fact, it is the medical metaphor that dominates: how can one fail to see in this machine for mobilizing the screen a kind of scanner, which both sweeps and cuts out its object, especially since the motif summoned to the image – in the plasma screen – is the human body. Graph literally works like a scanner, with its magic screen that moves back and forth, which «cuts» a lying man’s body, zone by zone, scanning it from head to toe and from toe to head, and by giving it to us to see closely, scrutinized in the smallest of its anatomical   details. Clinical look. This plasma body (the word itself is interesting), stretched out on the same dark clay balls that are in the showroom under the machinery, gives itself  to us completely naked, as if on a table. of examination. The impression is strange: there is obviously no real body visible under the screen, but  one could say that there is a virtual one, intensely present                                                                         Philippe Dubois

Graph from Emmanuel Carlier on Vimeo.