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| Lehmann Maupin Artists | Liisa Roberts | Paris | |
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Flash Art - November December 1999 (p.120)
Liisa Roberts Conceived specifically for the Côté rue road-facing space of the gallery, the installation "To derive an approach" (presented this summer at the Venice Biennial) demonstrates here its full operative effectiveness. A former shop open/closed to the public space through opaque windows, the space has been transformed into a container for a set-up that is simple but which nonetheless produces a complex compression of time and space. For this exhibition, Liisa Roberts once again turns to cinema projection. The artist considers the film "a record of one place, projected onto another." Entering the gallery the spectator sets off the projection of two images onto two transparent screens facing each other. The confrontation of two screens connected by a third panel of glass delimits the space of the work as well as the place of the spectator. Both films feature the same setting and both are silent, synchronized and of the same dimensions, facing each other like mirrors. The film follows the activity of a café from the interior and the exterior. Waitresses come and go amidst the customers while two women, seated at a table near the window, engage in conversation. This shop window becomes a metaphor for both the projecting screen and the space where the scene is staged. On the left-hand screen, the image is from the inside of the café as seen from the outside. On the right, the image of the same café from the inside looking out. The activity on the street is superimposed onto the activity in the café, the point of fusion being the window, a thin film separating the closed space from the space of flux. Defining herself as a "sculptress of space," Roberts has managed to integrate the spectator into the image with great subtlety - he finds himself literally cornered into a space where he now amounts to a simulacrum of reality. For Roberts, reality may well be that: a relation between us and the space of reality. Pascal Beausse
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