About Eric's tapes

by Franck Priot

From the first seconds while watching and listening to Éric Bonnafous's tapes, spectators can experience mixed feelings of obviousness and puzzlement that will never quit them: obviousness to begin with, because the almost "arterial like” fluidity of these perpetual sequences of colored shapes, oscillating to their heartbeats generate a mesmerizing sight. The astonished spectators then rush down the slopes of a scopic sensory pleasure which they can experience like a purely physical sensation, similar to the one left by a beam of sunlight on their skin. The immediacy of Bonnafous’s tapes also reveal their concrete mystery: these forms do not represent, or show, or evoke anything, or refer to anything ... And their artificiality is complicated by random, or at least, that’s what we feel, gazing at the constant mutation of the image, at this artificial "electronic” life.

Electronic, definitely yes, but analogic and non-digital. Éric Bonnafous uses multi-machine video benches and image mixers. He starts from real images, hacked among those screened on the television whose channels he snoops at night: film shots, news rushes, clip cuttings, which he picks for the inner motion of the image, and the colors that make it up. These images are then mixed, plasticated, combined, sampled like the sounds of techno music that will accompany them, with the tactility, the intervention in real time, the plasticity that allows work in analog. The images disappear, become a paste, a video material, colorful and electronic, gaping and alive, snorts, stretches and begins to vibrate before us. More visual artist than videographer, the creator has a relationship with his work that evokes action-painting.

Eric Bonnafous approached the video through television, working as film editor for the TV News. An atmosphere of emergency and editing on the go. No doubt those TV times emerge in EB’s latest artwork, "Riftia", with the insertion into the coloured-motion continuum of brief, openly real, very news-like images, passing at a glance through the electronic material. The symbiotic-fusion of these shreds of reality with the video material stands out in contrast with these newscast sequences overloaded with a "dramatization of real events" and the carefree abstraction of an electronic artificial life. And from this contradiction, from this incompatible match dawns a breath of humanity.

Franck Priot

"Tube", Fall, ninety-three. (1993)

traduction : Michel Gineste