Anyone with the good fortune to meet Robert Breer has experienced the moment at once collusive and magical, optical and sensual, and which stops time, when he gathers in his hand a collection of pages of his drawings and flips them, generating a sense of movement and creating a moving picture. “I’ve always been fascinated by the magic of the phenomenon; it’s the starting point for all my experimental films” said Breer.
“Between Cinema and Fixed Imagery” focuses on this essential moment in order to understand the complex, radical and experimental work that is also filled with humor and wit. The act is transformative, a miracle of illusion where the artist offers the pleasure of surprise to one who knows how to look. But before the flick of the pages, there are the drawings, the still picture, and the composition: Robert Breer began as a painter. If each of the photograms in his first films were a painting, Breer quickly began “to think of the moment on screen as an interruption in continuity.” And it is this process where time becomes a function of space and form that interests the artist.
In this exhibition, we wish to show the abundance of materials and film techniques used by Breer (drawings, cutouts, photos, collage, watercolor, spray paint, stencils, photomontage, news clippings…) along with his methodology of equivalence -juxtaposing wholly unrelated images- though the system did not always hold with his introduction of the random. These series of drawings offer glimpses of what cannot be seen in the films when they go by too quickly, and draw us in to look closer and look differently.
Translation Miles Hankin

Opening : Thursday, May 19th from 4pm to 8pm

mpefm FRANCE art press release