Pascale Guinet

We are seized by mixed feelings of attraction and questioning when faced with Pascale Guinet's films. The artist draws from a reservoir of stereotyped images relating everything as much to private lives or familiar events as to current events or history. This flux of images originates from a set of constructions, from sampling of the unconscient as well as from collective imagery. That is why we let ourselves get carried away by this continuum of images whose marked aesthetism is sometimes pushed to the extreme as in Kennedy. Each of these videos is titled as if these moments had been clearly identified by their author. We attach ourselves to them as if touched in our own intimacy, in the universe we have built for ourselves, made up of images without consistence and of key moments of a social life or history We are unable to see in these films, a simple game that tries to nostalgically reconstruct the fragments of a lost period. If we experience a troubled feeling faced with Pascale Guinet's work, it is because a principle of uncertainty animates these kinds of phantom narration. Ambiguity first dwells on the question of the author. Is the reconstitution of oneself (or of one's fiction) possible? It is difficult to make out which personality is being described in the various episodes which are the archives of a previous life. Are they images from memory, documentaries or fiction? The singularity of a self is diluted within the multiplicity of these scenes which go from a simple ballad to the sudden witnessing of an actual event. Pascale Guinet mixes up these categories to place us in front of a construction set having multiple interpretations. Being sufficiently inaccurate and sufficiently vague, these videos give us the freedom to knit the threads of the fiction of an existence in the manner we choose.

This principle of uncertainty is as much a generator as a revealer of the overall confusion that reigns between reality and fiction in a TV reality show society which pushes mediatisation of intimacy to such excesses as to make them the raw matter of our daily sit-coms.