Matière noire, Martin Désilets
Specters of Art
> In 2017, Martin Désilets began Matière noire, a procedural work that unfolds in an extended temporality, a lifetime in fact. Matière noire consists of photographing all modern and contemporary visual works found in museums, and superimposing them in a single digital file until complete black is obtained. In the surfeit of images, which provokes what many call an “attention crisis,” the artist offers us paradoxical works, at once ethereal and dense, which require a slowing down of the gaze.
> The book Matière noire presents the first 100 states of the series of the same title, andAll the Disasters of War, another important work in the artist's career, created by superimposing the eighty engravings from Francisco de Goya's series The Disasters of War. Three critical essays by authors Catherine Nichols, Michel Poivert, and Pauline Martin complete this work published by the Berlin-based publishing house Distanz.
> Let us return to Matière noire and its process. And perhaps, especially, to the astrophysical metaphor contained in its title: “black matter,” or “dark mater,” resonates with the renowned “black holes” in the collective imagination. […] There is a little of this in Matière noire, when we bring the discussion to the level of art history. The superimposition of countless works of art, like so many stars whose light can no longer reach us, forms a kind of sensitive plate that would stand as art’s negative. Is this not the methodic darkening of pictorial matter, opacifying the camera screen, and then the print produced from the concatenation? If everything is fuzzy, blurred, and opacified, sometimes to the point of blackness, this invisibility is paradoxically quite visible. It is a mass of presences, but showing only the succession of transparencies from which the material must be substracted. There is indeed something from beyond, and if not from the outer limits recorded through the astronomer’s lens, what else could it be but the phantoms of art? - Michel Poivert
Distanz, 2025
Text in English, French and German
Hard cover
28 × 21 cm
178 pages
ISBN : 978-3-95476-789-2
Matière noire, Martin Désilets
Specters of Art
> In 2017, Martin Désilets began Matière noire, a procedural work that unfolds in an extended temporality, a lifetime in fact. Matière noire consists of photographing all modern and contemporary visual works found in museums, and superimposing them in a single digital file until complete black is obtained. In the surfeit of images, which provokes what many call an “attention crisis,” the artist offers us paradoxical works, at once ethereal and dense, which require a slowing down of the gaze.
> The book Matière noire presents the first 100 states of the series of the same title, andAll the Disasters of War, another important work in the artist's career, created by superimposing the eighty engravings from Francisco de Goya's series The Disasters of War. Three critical essays by authors Catherine Nichols, Michel Poivert, and Pauline Martin complete this work published by the Berlin-based publishing house Distanz.
> Let us return to Matière noire and its process. And perhaps, especially, to the astrophysical metaphor contained in its title: “black matter,” or “dark mater,” resonates with the renowned “black holes” in the collective imagination. […] There is a little of this in Matière noire, when we bring the discussion to the level of art history. The superimposition of countless works of art, like so many stars whose light can no longer reach us, forms a kind of sensitive plate that would stand as art’s negative. Is this not the methodic darkening of pictorial matter, opacifying the camera screen, and then the print produced from the concatenation? If everything is fuzzy, blurred, and opacified, sometimes to the point of blackness, this invisibility is paradoxically quite visible. It is a mass of presences, but showing only the succession of transparencies from which the material must be substracted. There is indeed something from beyond, and if not from the outer limits recorded through the astronomer’s lens, what else could it be but the phantoms of art? - Michel Poivert
Distanz, 2025
Text in English, French and German
Hard cover
28 × 21 cm
178 pages
ISBN : 978-3-95476-789-2
