Image seconde english

Second image

The most appropriate metaphor for speaking about the work of Nicolas H Muller is certainly the cinema. Not from the perspective of the spectator, but rather from the director’s point of view. While you are at an exhibition of Nicolas H Muller, you become the one able to circulate freely, at maximum speed, so fast that entire scenes can be summarised in a second and even in one single picture.

What you see first in his exhibitions are second image, stealth and second-hand, but this is only a handle. Beyond the references, if you look a second time, it is indeed the critical space of the exhibition as a medium that arises. Subliminal image or residual, the goal is the same: reaching beyond consciousness, touching something deep which gives birth – because it is mediated plastically, because the spectator shifts to a different place – a necessary interrogation.

Sometimes, in slow motion, you do prolong a picture so long that it could represent a whole film or even the film history. Such a long image, an image / month or rather an image / me that’s getting spatial and personal distortions for that differential layer of cultural sedimentation and our link with them have an impact. The work acting in the space of the exhibition, hanging on the wall or as an installation, where the relationship with itself is the most decisive.

Julien Bouillon