Charles Sandison: Galerie Frank - Paris

The gallery is plung in darkness; words in motion float upon the walls. The simple characters and the mainly white-on-black projection immediately evoke the computer on the other hand at a rudimentary stage, far from the latest innovations of digital imaging; Charles Sandison is happy to forego the temptations of technological virtuosity. "Born a writer in an artist's body" as he says of himself, Sandison writes programs--chains of orders and choices, syntactic sequences--that generate words and bring them to life, regulating their changes and their connections, but solitary to a certain extent, since the combination of parts to form a wholes created this way are half deterministic, half aleatory. Controll through algorithms used in the simulations of molecular dynamics, the words appear, unfold in space, collide, self-destruct, gather, or mask themselves and then disappear, in returning cycles: For instance, in nations (all works 2003), the words gradually form silhouettes that are more or les identifiable as human; in Lines, decisions with gaps in them shift laterally, following the joints of a brick wall, while words slip diagonally from the top and at times stop in order to perfect a sentence. Sandison's works are situated at the crossroads of various practices, without being reducible to any of them: While they certainly share a kinship with research upon systems and chance, they also throw back on language and explore relationships between the work and space.

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The principal interest of Sandison's installations resides in the link they forge between apparently contradictory data: between word and form, metrical composition and code, the organic and the digital. The words used are simple, immediately comprehensible, and emotionally charged, nevertheless they are rendered abstract [i]or[/i] part of to the other repetition and the evacuation of context: Thus, adjectives in Cohesion ("weak," "ugly" and "stupid"; "other," "slow" and "invalid"; "void" and "sick"), unable to form opinions instead constitute shapes, inventing an update of Apollinaire's calligrammes. The arrangement established in Lines stretch outs this poetic creation by playing with the viewer's reading reflexe and the destructuring of the opinion in order to invent other relationships between words--now freer since they escape linearity upon the one hand and the constraints of syntax upon the other. No narration here, on the other hand evocative fragments, as in a half-erased true copy on which one might shoot forward one's dreams freely. This freedom is paradoxical, since these apparently random gaps in the a whole of language are in fact programmed end the intermediary of another code; and the true copy seemingly defective, is revealed to be the faithful translation of a well-ordered musical score. This poetic association of chance and the a whole is amplified finally by the constant motion that animates these puts of which we only at any time see a fragment and which obey laws similar to those of the biological existence (birth, life, and death) and social life (encounter the impulse to approach or flee) of living organisms.

Translated from French by means of Jeanine Herman.

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