Videoinsight® Magazine 2016|3 | Georges H. Rabbath ‘The Better World’
Georges H. Rabbath. The Better World
The Time of the Images: A Precise Position for Desire
Videoinsight® Garden, April 11, 2016
In the Videoinsight® Garden of Rebecca Russo, during the artistic-performative and interactive experience titled “The Better World”, the photographer Georges H. Rabbath has literally amplified the relationship with the subject of his own desire, formally and conceptually pentrating the content of the experiment. The result is a fascinating and poetic video series: tableaux vivants, action shots, images of true aspiration for new possibilities.
Creating images that expresse movement is the mode that the conventional representation has always adopted. Founded on the principle of contiguity between character, environment and narrative function instance, its nature links the whole construction to cause and effect chains. Editing will be inevitably hidden, invisible, functional to the story. Actions and gestures by characters will take place in a coherent manner and in accordance with the general set that makes and provides sense and total comprehension. This does not happen only for cinema, in the movies: we can find the same peculiarities in traditional creations: painting and sculpture, photography and theater.
The image, however, that can release time, can emancipate vision from any plot. While in the first case it was all functional to the narrative pretext, now every moment exude a new intuition, open to emptiness, expanded to unlimited space, to long waits, non-places, biological or existential suspended landscapes. The fluidity becomes protagonist, it gives up the composure to the polarities of signifiers: the characters are dispersed into the environment, placing himself in opposition to it, demonstrating their perpetual strangeness.
The creative power loose all linearity power: the narrative offers other utopian solutions. Hence the better world, perception of a way out: not only golden age, but clear and sharp variation and formulation of the future, premonition that self-fulfills.
Captured at the same time, the subject and his labor: the hints of all time spent and the mystery of the birth, the enigma of becoming. This is the aim of the portrait painter, the artist’s battle. The aesthetic practice makes constantly image, it outlines effigies and colors, it cuts through boundaries of universes: writing, music, visual arts, actor’s body or performing agents. This creation has nothing to do with imagination or memories clearly and definitively verbalized, with necessarily sensitive determinations. In contrast, the figure can be understood and perceived in the nakedness of a concept, on the wings of a prediction, in the purity of content, in the suggestion that remains etched within the encephalic depth, plowing into our unconsciousness. Photography, as a transcription of light, gives always to us an illusion of truth, asking for a suspension of disbelief. Although it can not be defined in terms of probability, cause each shot requires a choice and implies a point of view, it needs a prior approval. During the last century, paintings and video art have sucked lighting, assimilated the expressive capacity.
On April 11, 2016, within the Videoinsight® Garden Rebecca Russo, Georges H. Rabbath wandered with his camera lens. All we thought about a classic shooting session, enhanced by the author’s talent, always attentive to reports of improvisation between individuality and environmental, historical, relational circumstances. Participants would have wandered through the charming garden, thinking of their particular and unique idea of a better world in harmony with the requests and supporting structures of the Videoinsight® Method by Rebecca Russo. They should have found a vital equilibrium in a precise point between trees and shrubs and finally they should have let capture the attentive gaze of the artist. Georges himself, however, amplified his experience: he “improved” its relationship with the others, with the subjects of his own desire, penetrating formally and conceptually the content of the experiment. His works have been working on a spaceless time enriched by the movement: the place has become set design, an integral part of the journey in a universe all made by new energy. The fixity of the shot was prolonged into a sequence of few seconds tablaux vivants: Georges has filmed short videos, films that will become, perhaps, series of still images or prints. The result, for now, is the sharing of shorts without plot: the outline that binds them is the desire for a two-way possibility, the perfection of a dialogue made of silence, breath and pure existence.
By Ivan Fassio
