Pascal Grandmaison’s non-narrative films and videos offer poetic and critical meditations on the nature of representation. The experiments he carries out, on natural materials as much as on artificial ones, form a eulogy to decomposition, an ode to matter’s capacity to transform things, and the continual renewal of the cycle of living matter. A latent polarity manifests itself in the sweet tension of oppositional principles: light and dark, presence and absence, material and immaterial, force and fragility, reality and imaginary, distance and intimacy, gravity and weightlessness.

For Nostalgie #1 Grandmaison was inspired by Albert Camus’s account of Sisyphus, who, according to Greek myth was punished for all eternity to roll a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back down to the bottom after he reaches the top. Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, claims that he is the ideal absurd hero and that his punishment is representative of the human condition: Sisyphus must struggle perpetually and without hope of success. In Grandmaison’s video, the rock is tethered to a rope and pulled by an invisible force.