The macLYON offers Christine Rebet her first monographic museum exhibition, entitled Escapologie [Escapology], inspired by the art of evasion or escape. Fascinated by the magic and optical illusions that inhabited the landscape of pre-cinematographic entertainment, as well as by late 19th-centuryspiritualism, Christine Rebet combines history and fiction in fantasized realms, playing with the viewers’ subconscious through deceptive devices still used in contemporary politics and the media.
Whether testifying to early 20th-century dictatorships or current upheavals in the Middle East, the artist creates connections between the mechanisms of entertainment and propaganda, between the powers of the mass media and oppressive regimes, exploring with ambivalent fascination the seductive power of illusory techniques.
Drawing is at the heart of her artistic practice. Inspired bypre-cinema, she chooses animation, a hybrid medium where repeated drawings give the illusion of movement and create what she calls her “paper cinema.”
Animated cinema allows many forms of experimentation, however it comprises a painstaking creative process. Christine Rebet sometimes produces as many as 3,500 hand drawn images with her team to create a five-minute animated film. Unlike a film, which captures a number of continuous images per second, animation produces movement from static images, each of them a fully-fledged drawing, made on top of each other and connected to each other. Drawing, which is her main medium, is intimately linked to language and mime, as well as sound and music.
In her hand-drawn animations filmed in 16 or 35mm, Christine Rebet adopts the stylistic and musical approach of early cartoons, down to their subversive aspect, referring to the beginnings of musical series like Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies(1929-39), which introduced synchronized musical accompaniment to the on-screen action.
As important as the lines of her drawings are the textual elements that punctuate her films. Words are often the echoes of a hidden scene or omens. The artist writes these words in English, thereby distancing herself from French, her mother tongue: “It is as if I become a ventriloquist and an inner voice[...] arises. [...] For me, creation is like an intuitive appearance where image and language are inseparable.”
For the Escapologie exhibition at the macLYON, Christine Rebet presents six animated films, varying in length between three and eight minutes, including the unreleased Otolithe. The scenography has been designed as a succession of immersive spaces, into which the visitor is invited to enter. Her films are accompanied by preparatory drawings made for the synopses, or specifically created for the animations, as well as mural and canvas paintings. The works on display retrace over fifteen years of the artist’s work.
Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are drawn to the song Bullet Sisters , from the film Brand Band News (2005). The film illustrates how the artist thwarts cinematographic technique through phase-shifting games, producing an ironic crossover of images and sounds. The sounds are recorded directly in the studio during filming (the friction of sheets of paper passing under the lens, the noise of pulleys and cranks, the movements and sounds of the 35-mm camera motor...) and produce a swarm of sound textures, completing the invisible narrative of what the eye cannot see. Viewers hear things without seeing them, just as silent images emerge, telling the characters’ fragmented stories. The soundtrack becomes the veritable narrative of the film.
