a project by miquel mont
comprising:
a film, made jointly with Anne-Marie Cornu, a performance
in a set of portraits
a book (in preparation)

One thing that years of experience of subsistence as a visual artist has taught me is that affects have no image, or none that has any correspondence: they are, by definition, unrepresentable, resisting embodiment even through the abstraction of language.

This project began in 2015 with two oil portraits I painted of my mother – one, for my analyst, as a way of paying off a debt I had with them, and the other for my mother, as a gift. The experience awakened in me a desire to explore the relationships between the mental images associated with these unrepresentable emotions on the one hand, and their evocations through the gestures and actions of artistic practice on the other. This project might seem a little odd coming from someone who has been more concerned with questioning abstraction (the abstractions that inform painting or the pictorial) and its attendant vehicles of presentation. But, in reality, I have long been of the belief that our era has radically modified our relationship with representation, image and subjectivity, both individual and collective, erasing, among other things, Western modern art’s historical distinction between figuration and abstraction.

On a pragmatic level, I have drawn on personal memories, stories, sensations, images, feelings and fictions to try and give an account of the family history that has made me the person and the artist I am. I have been guided by the affects binding me to it and carried through many twists, chasms and projections in a lengthy process of introspection, the fruit of which is this performance: a collaborative film and compendium of portraits, most of them non-figurative, of my original family: my mother, father, four sisters and two brothers. The multiplicity of materials, techniques and formats has imposed itself naturally in response to the complexity and intangible nature of the affects that bind me to each of the persons portrayed.