The contemporary echo of Point and Ransonnet

The Jean-Pierre Point and Jean-Pierre Ransonnet exhibitions resonate with each other. Both bear witness to what we could call a “defensive reflex” shared by two artists (although there were many more at the time), faced with the proliferation of uniform images made possible by the development of new means for reproducing images industrially. Both were part of a bigger movement that saw artists using forms of resistance (screen-printing, manual editing, coloured filters, etc.) against the uniform images distributed by the media.

These days, if we see this phenomenon as characteristic of the 1970s, it nonetheless has a contemporary resonance. Indeed, at a time when smartphones exponentially multiply photographic possibilities and social networks act as unprecedented distribution channels, many artists are developing strategies to distance these images. They favour other media and load them with new complexity, thereby removing their production from the immediate consumption characterising the incessant flow of images. Diversifying to restore complexity to the world, rather than standardising and simplifying, requires more sustained attention as opposed to quick consumption before discarding, and are perhaps the current recommendations sent us by these two artists.

- Pierre-Olivier Rollin