The End of the Night

LACE is proud to continue the collaboration with Ceci N’est Pas… in presenting The End of the Night, organized by curator Martha Kirszenbaum, a bold group exhibition exploring the impact of French filmmaker, Henri-Georges Clouzot and his unfinished 1963-1964 film, L'Enfer, on notions of abstraction, the kinetic, and optical illusions in contemporary French art. For this exhibition, Kirszenbaum has invited five artists whose works reflect on Clouzot’s pictorial and sound experimentation and respond to his visual and sensorial imagination: a historical figure, Julio Le Parc, and four emerging artists, Florian & Michael Quistrebert, Isabelle Cornaro and Pierre-Laurent Cassière. Kirszenbaum's project is a double exhibition -- the other half taking place at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, emphasizing a similarly themed exploration of the work of Los Angeles experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger.

L’Enfer is an unfinished, psychological drama depicting the obsessional jealousy of its main character, Marcel Prieur, for his attractive wife. The film utilizes a binary, intricate structure: the couple’s everyday life in the hotel they manage is filmed in black and white with a conventional soundtrack, but Marcel’s sudden jealousy crisis and madness attacks perturb his perceptions, and make him see and hear a distorted reality where the characters become vividly spotted in revolving acid colors, while the surrounding sound turns into a magma of screams, noises and accelerated whispers. As a result of Clouzot’s obsession with technical experimentation, the film incorporates the hallmarks of kinetic and optical art along with sound effects in order to express its main character’s jealousy, madness and nightmare.