From the other side, Juliette Lemontey
“There is another world but it is in this one.” Paul Eluard
That scoop-back pink sweater, a cowboy lighting a cigarette, the little black evening gown worn with ropes of pearls, a portrait of an Indian, a group of dancers, that embracing couple, all spark a déjà vu: a movie scene, a photo pose, the memory of a moment, a feeling…
For From the Other Side, her first show at the Amélie du Chalard gallery in New York, Juliette Lemontey took as her subject images from American movies in her personal filmography. Each refers to more or less familiar images from cinema’s collective memory, without insisting upon total re/cognition. At once close and distant, these “freeze frames” echo intimate sensations and emotions. What creates their strange proximity? No doubt it is the instability of the image, the emptiness of the backgrounds, the absence of defined faces, the bleached complexions, the enveloping silence, the variations on a reprise, that give the imagination a screen to fill as well as an offscreen to be imagined. For the goal is not to create an exact likeness of the source image—in any event, the artist slyly covers her tracks by giving the title of a film to a scene from a different film or the title of a song to another image—but rather to evoke it, to give an “impression” of it. Like the impress of a painted surface, like a monotype, the impression cannot make the resulting image exactly resemble the original. There is always some modification, slight as it may be, a wavering of the line, through which a blurring insinuates. Blurring of line, of feeling, blurring even of what is remembered. Caught in the silent time of painting, traces left on the fabric of second-hand sheets, figures appear to hang back, mute presences of an indefinite past, portraying, in a present that has already occurred, “ghost” figures, returning from the dead. Returning to the light, to the light through painting, but impalpable.
Every film image is a “ghost” image, since it appears only the moment it is projected. From the screen to the canvas, the paintings of From the Other Side expand this “ghostly” nature, with which the artist is in perfect harmony. If Gilles Deleuze in his course on painting claimed that we “unmake resemblance to make the image emerge,” in Juliette Lemontey’s paintings unmaking resemblance leaves her “images” somewhat in suspense, giving the impression that they are rising from the reverse of the canvas, from the other side. And in this intermediate space where a palpable world unfolds, the artist recreates her fiction among all these movie scenes. They call out to each other, reply, sometimes even replay themselves, like the scoop-neck sweater series with its three versions. As this sequence is among those most admired by cinephiles and gives the show its title, let’s come back to it. The actress Nastassja Kinski is in a room, separated by a one-way mirror from the man who has been searching for her and has just found her in her workplace. As she turns around, the viewer sees her face at the same time the man does. The shot, whose emotion is palpable, could last an eternity, be held forever. Become a picture.
Stopping movement at one instant, that of a heartbeat, a shudder, a brief smile, or even the soaring of a dance step—although the influence of painting on cinema has often been demonstrated, less has been said of what cinema does to painting and how it continues to work within memory and the extension of time. The silence of From the Other Side’s figures speaks to us, gazes at us. It is an invitation to come nearer, to enter an inner world. David Lynch, as much a visual artist as a director, suggested going even further: “In the world of painting it’s just getting deep into that world and getting lost in there…. It doesn’t always happen in a smooth way, but it’s so great to be in it.”
Marie Gayet, independent art critic, AICA-France member
1 Gilles Deleuze Sur la peinture, cours mars-juin 1981, coll : Paradoxe, Les Éditions de Minuit, 2023. p.110
2 Film Paris, Texas de Wim Wenders (1984)
3 Vidéo avec David Lynch (1946-2025) vue sur Instagram