Benedenzaal CC Kortrijk, Belgium 2009
multimedia

In the same way as the beholder, faced with this emptiness, has an encounter with something inside himself, eye in eye with a projection of zooming into the videostills who mirror the street map of New York, in the same way the image asks for the urbanized world as a condensed place of disappearing and revival on the rhythm of our heartbeat. And this is realised out of a bird’s- eye view. Is this the view of the supposed panoptic eye? In this case we face rather an eternal researching eye. It is an eye that first of all wants to registrate. And so this eye catches the ever changing rhythm and compresses it to the abstract minimal of her regularity. As if Monique Thomaes here, in this specific spatial context, puts a selfportrait forwards. It is a portrait of a postmodern subject as the fragmented residue of an enduring visuality. Beyond every large gesture, her installation functions as the homeopathy of every pathetic sentiment. The scanty poetry of her imaging never has the intention to go into any kind of nostalgia. There’s one central thing that remains. This is what Marcel Duchamp one’s mentioned in a pointed way and in his unsurpassed French: “une optique de précison flottante”. Which we can try to translate as: “an optics of flowing accurancy”.

Joannes Késenne