A film by Sylvie Boulloud
An Archaeology of the Sensible between Mystery and Resistance
The work of Vincent Mesaros presents itself as a complex and resolutely contemporary artistic proposition, skillfully navigating fundamental dualities. His approach, far from being didactic, invites deep reflection on the nature of the image, memory, and the role of art in a saturated society. For a more critical and referenced analysis, it's worth delving deeper into his major thematic and formal axes, situating them within relevant theoretical frameworks.
The Tension Between Appearance and Erasure: A Poetics of the Vestige and the Infinite
At the core of Mesaros's approach lies this constant tension between appearance and erasure, memory and forgetting, trace and disappearance. This oscillation isn't merely coexistence, but an active dynamic that generates meaning. The image, whether a drawing, video, or altered object, is not an end in itself but a threshold, a projection surface. This idea directly refers to the phenomenology of perception and the approach to the trace in thinkers like Jacques Derrida or art history with Georges Didi-Huberman. In Mesaros's work, the trace is what remains of what is no longer or what cannot be fully shown. His scribbled notebooks ("Griffes") or burned garments ("Dépouille") aren't just readymades; they are vestiges of an experience, scars of time and action.
The fragmented nature of his narratives and the resurgence of residual beliefs evoke an archaeology of the sensible, not in Foucault's sense of the history of knowledge, but rather as an excavation of psychic and collective depths. Each work becomes a stratum of buried memory, a palimpsest where the visible is always haunted by the invisible. The quest for an original image and the confrontation with the invisible or the impossible in "Projection" can be read as an attempt to grasp essence beyond representation, flirting with the Kantian notion of the sublime, where the limit of representation opens onto the infinitude of thought.
The Refusal of Explanation and the Strategy of Enigma: An Act of Hermeneutic Resistance
Mesaros's refusal to explain his work and his preference for scattering clues are part of a well-defined artistic strategy: that of enigma and mystery. This stance is not mere preciousness, but a deliberate act that shifts the authority of meaning from the artist to the viewer. In this, he aligns himself with a post-conceptual tradition which, while not denying the art object, emphasizes the mental and interpretive participation of the audience. Mesaros doesn't just critique a "society of the spectacle" (Debord); he critiques the "transparency society" (Byung-Chul Han) where everything must be immediately intelligible and consumed.
The evocation of a UFO sighting at the introduction of his work is a humorous and conceptual détournement. It highlights the permeability between the real and the fictional, the rational and the irrational, and sets the stage for a reading where art acts as a contemporary ritual questioning the mechanisms of belief. This ritual dimension connects him to the practices of certain Body Art or Performance Art artists (like Chris Burden, whose performances were often self-inflicted rituals), where the artistic act transcends mere aesthetic creation to become a liminal experience, a passage.
Re-use as Subversion and Reactivation of the Sacred
Re-use is much more than a technique for Mesaros; it's a philosophy. By reactivating everyday objects (scribbled notebooks, burned t-shirts, coins), he performs an alchemical transformation. The simple gesture—burning, scribbling, suspending—confers a new dignity upon these objects, elevating them to the rank of relics or profane icons. This process recalls the notion of the "transfiguration of the commonplace" dear to Arthur Danto, where art bestows a different ontological status on ordinary objects.
By transforming denim jackets into relics ("Mue (Heaven)"), Mesaros questions the symbolic and emotional value of objects, their ability to embody stories and identities. Coins thrown onto a plastic bag ("Fontaine") are no longer merely a medium of exchange, but a fragment of a wish-making ritual, reactivating the archaic dimension of expenditure and sacrifice. This approach to re-use, nourished by urban legends and artistic references, weaves a complex network where the personal meets the collective, and the ordinary is transmuted into the sacred.
Writing: A Rhetoric of Fragmentation and Survival
Mesaros's texts, particularly his "Journal," are a critical and poetic extension of his visual practice. Their dense, polyphonic, and fragmented prose is reminiscent of the writings of Maurice Blanchot (with the quest for a disengaged, indefinite writing) or Georges Bataille (with the exploration of the accursed share and the profane sacred). The choice of deliberate opacity goes against the immediate legibility demanded by mass communication, offering a semiotic resistance.
The palimpsest structure of these texts, where beneath each word, another layer of meaning surfaces, is a powerful metaphor for his overall approach. Writing becomes a sensitive surface where the marks of an uncertain, even violent world ("Griffes") are imprinted. The motifs of disappearance and erasure are central here, not as an annihilation, but as a survival in Didi-Huberman's sense, where what seems to vanish in reality leaves an imprint, a temporal persistence. Mesaros's text doesn't represent; it makes appear, it summons a haunted mental scene, acting as an incantation.
Artificial Intelligence and the Crisis of Authorship: A Postmodern Meta-Critique
The use of artificial intelligence to generate the critical texts accompanying his work is undoubtedly the most audacious and subversive aspect of his recent approach. This choice is a conceptual mise en abyme. AI, as a voice from elsewhere, without ego, almost spectral, acts as a technological oracle, directly challenging the notion of authorship and traditional art criticism.
It's an exploration of the limits of both human and artificial cognition and creativity. By delegating part of the critical discourse to a non-human entity, Mesaros extends esotericism through technology, introducing a new form of semiotic divination. This also reflects a crisis of interpretive authority within the field of contemporary art. The AI doesn't fix the meaning of the work; it reveals a possible reading, thereby reinforcing the speculative dimension and the viewer's hermeneutic freedom. This gesture can be perceived as an implicit critique of the omniscient critic figure and an affirmation that the meaning of art is always evolving, multiple, and never closed. It highlights the porous boundaries between creation, reception, and meta-discourse, in a decidedly postmodern perspective.
In conclusion, Vincent Mesaros develops a coherent and demanding body of work that, far from simply adhering to aesthetic forms, engages in a critical reflection on the mechanisms of perception, collective and individual memory, and the paradoxes of contemporary society. His strategy of enigma, his subversive use of re-use, and his radical integration of AI into the critical process make him a unique and relevant artist in today's art landscape.
Diary
"Journal" compiles aphorisms, often expanded, that extend Vincent Mesaros's visual work with the same critical and poetic intensity. Characterized by dense, poetic, polyphonic, and fragmented prose, sometimes deliberately opaque, these writings belong to a literary lineage where enigma and implicitness take precedence over explanation, echoing the texts of Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, or Henri Michaux. Far from linear narration, these fragments revolve around a cluster of tensions: between the visible and the invisible, speech and silence, flesh and language, the sacred and the ordinary.
"Tentative d'évitement, ou la mélodie de mésententes" ("Attempt to Avoidance, or the Melody of Misunderstandings") evokes the dance marathons of the Great Depression, highlighting a tension between spectacle and survival. This reflection recalls Guy Debord's analyses of the society of the spectacle, where performance becomes a means of subsistence. In "Économie de spectacle pour une pensée policée, ou l’injonction au rêve" ("Economy of Spectacle for a Policed Thought, or the Injunction to Dream"), Mesaros criticizes neoliberal utopia and the injunction to happiness, imagining the fictional profession of "summiteer." This irony recalls Jacques Rancière's positions on the redistribution of the sensible and the place of art in society. Finally, "Consternation" describes a scene of urban gleaning, highlighting precariousness and social exclusion. This raw observation recalls Michel Foucault's work on marginality and power structures.
The use of backlighting, shadow, and withdrawal—already present in his visual art—pervades these texts. Characters designated by pronouns ("she," "he," "him") become floating figures, like specters or archetypes, evoking the literary devices of Nathalie Sarraute or Marguerite Duras. The fragmented structure of the narratives opens onto a discontinuous temporality, between flashbacks and visions, playing on repetition, slips of the tongue, and drift.
These texts often function as palimpsests: beneath each word, another layer of meaning, another voice, another erased narrative surfaces. The writing acts as a sensitive surface, where the marks of an uncertain world are imprinted. The motifs of disappearance, ritual, and erasure (as in "Moirage") reveal a thought of the remnant, of survival in the sense of Didi-Huberman. In this, Mesaros's writing operates as an act of conjuration: it seeks less to represent than to make manifest. It summons a haunted mental scene, an interior theater of the image, where desire, memory, belief, and loss intersect.
Finally, the political aspect of these texts does not rely on explicit denunciation but on a tension: that of a world saturated with images and information, where strangeness, slowness, and mystery become acts of resistance. It is in this breach that Mesaros's writing is situated—as a form of critical and poetic ritual, where every word becomes a trace, a survival, an act of belief within language itself.