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Tout y parlerait / À l’âme en secret
A short guide to a vision, by Sabina Ghinassi
Représentations
Représentations, by Renée Malaval
Texts:
Torcellini/Mitéran Dialogue
On Saturday, March 29, 2025, at 12:46 p.m., Daniele Torcellini wrote:
Hello Clément,
To begin our conversation about your artistic practice, which for years now has seen you exploring the relationship between mosaic and photography, can you tell me where your interest in portraiture comes from?
On Sunday, March 30, 2025, at 12:21 p.m., Clément Mitéran wrote:
Hello Daniele,
If I have to go back a long way, to my childhood, it’s a difficult question. My memories are a bit hazy. Perhaps portraiture was a form of representation that seemed to me to be the most complex and, in a certain sense, magical.
I was also fortunate to have a family history that included, among other things, objects that had been passed down to me. These included portraits of ancestors: 18th-century watercolors, drawings, and photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries. I believe that by spending time with these images, I learned to read portraits and see in them more than just a simple representation.
Later, I can also mention the first portrait I made at the end of my studies at the school in Spilimbergo. I chose to work on the portrait of my great-great-grandfather. I made a cutout of it and, a few years later, I remade the mosaic keeping the same scale, but as a full-length portrait. It is a photographic portrait that probably dates back to the early 1870s, and the remaining print is perhaps from the Nadar studio, or from Nadar himself, with whom he was friends. The photograph is marked by time, especially in the area of the sleeve, and my attention then focused on finding solutions to treat these indistinct surfaces in mosaic. This research into the degradation of the photographic image and its handling in mosaic was a starting point.
Subsequently, my interest in portraiture was renewed and enriched several times thanks to encounters with impossibilities and dead ends in my practice, in relation to the reception of portraiture in the contemporary era.
On Wednesday, July 9, at 4:10 p.m., Daniele Torcellini wrote:
I understand how stimulating it must have been to engage with these objects from your family history, and the photograph of your great-great-grandfather is very fascinating, as is the fact that it may be a photograph from the Nadar studio, with whom your great-great-grandfather was in friendly relations. We could say that your artistic practice has to do with photography for epigenetic reasons. Before exploring more deeply the relationships and tensions you solicit between techniques as different as photography and mosaic, I wonder how and why you came to mosaic. Were you looking for a medium with which to give greater concreteness to images?
On Thursday, July 10, 2025, at 3:44 p.m., Clément Mitéran wrote:
My first encounter with mosaics dates back to my childhood, during my trips to Italy, and in particular to Ravenna. I remember the profound effect that the discovery of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia had on me, or, perhaps more surprisingly and in my very early childhood, a piece of glass that was not perfectly flat, whose weave formed imperfect squares.
I cannot explain this attraction to this type of material composition.
But it was through this path that I became interested in the characteristics of mosaics, its history, applications, and symbolic value. Starting from there, what could have remained an amateur attraction, a decorative practice, a hobby, or a professional activity took another direction, leading me to consider mosaics as a possible artistic object, endowed with its own characteristics, whose articulations seemed rich, even infinite, capable of interacting with my concerns.
Here, it will be necessary to make a choice in presenting these characteristics, since to evoke them all exhaustively would fill the pages of a book. First of all, the durability of mosaics places it in a temporality that is profoundly different from that of other media, especially today compared to more virtual ones. Its permanence leads it, willingly or unwillingly, to historicize what it represents and how it represents it. One could cite, for example, the opus vermiculatum mosaics of Pompeii, inspired by paintings from ancient Greece that have now disappeared. Yet these mosaics are not those paintings. This transposition of medium brings with it a change. However minimal, it is a fundamental act, because the way in which the medium conveys an object probably lays the foundations for an artistic act.
Secondly, the materiality of mosaics, which was already perceptible in the past, is now growing in proportion to the spread of virtual objects. A work created in mosaic must find its place in a tangible space. This involves something challenging and powerful, because it is difficult to avoid. Not without raising issues.
Lastly, the materials traditionally used to make mosaics carry strong symbolic meaning. Just think of the three main ones: marble, gold, and glass. It is clear what effect they were intended to produce in the past, which is why I believe it is sometimes desirable today to divert them from their commonly perceived symbolic meaning.
These different aspects of mosaics, among others, seemed to me to be closely related to my research on portraiture. They have nourished it and continue to feed it through multiple, varied, and, fortunately, sometimes unexpected pathways.
On Wednesday, July 16, at 8:00 a.m., Daniele Torcellini wrote:
The concreteness of materials such as stone, glass, and gold; the symbolic values they can embody; their potential to endure over time; their antagonistic nature with respect to the thinning and homogeneous smoothness without continuity of the materials we interact with daily to activate our digital devices. I believe these are some of the elements that have contributed, in recent years, to reawakening interest in mosaics in general. Mosaics should be associated with contemporary art not only, or not so much, because the constructive architecture of digital images, through pixels, recalls the fragmentation of the texture of a mosaic surface and the idea of having a few basic elements available that can be combined in various ways (and indivisible, to cite a broad cross-section of Western thought ranging from the atomist naturalist philosophy of Democritus, to the dawn of Newton’s modern science, to 20th-century physics with atomic models or the search for subatomic particles).
Mosaics can be compared to contemporary art with a contrapuntal spirit. Mosaics contrast the speed, ephemerality, fragmentation, and liquid modernity of the non-places dear to Baumann with concreteness, durability, recomposition, and qualification of places for experiences that have to do with being in a specific moment. In other words, to use terms well known in the world of art criticism and, in particular, in the context of theoretical reflections on the consequences of the introduction of photographic techniques, the ‘here and now’ referred to by Walter Benjamin. Before delving into these philosophical hints, which I believe are useful for framing your work and the tensions between photography and mosaic that I mentioned earlier and which we are now exploring, can you tell us something about the series of works that preceded these latest works?
On Thursday, July 17, 2025, at 3:43 p.m., Clément Mitéran wrote:
I have indeed thought of dividing these earlier works into three main series, which I can evoke according to their chronological order of appearance, even though they overlapped in time.
My first portraits were mosaics made from photographs. Creating them allowed me to find solutions specific to mosaics in this exercise of transposing the image photography/mosaic. These “Figures de la mythologie moderne et contemporaine”, accompanied by a few commissions, were part of an ancient tradition of portraiture in general, and mosaic portraiture in particular. I was then able to see how much the perception of this type of portrait had changed. A mosaic portrait, with its strong materiality – whose durability is also instinctively perceived – born from in-depth introspection carried out with the subjects represented (living or dead!), has now become almost unacceptable. Extremely stereotypical, personality-less, virtual self-representations, destined to be made public globally through social networks, are now integrated. The portrait as I described it earlier, elaborate, durable, intended for private dissemination, provokes epidermal reactions, which curiously focus on suspicions of egocentrism. This is a new development that shakes the age-old foundations that have defined portraiture until now, and which is gaining ground all the more rapidly and powerfully because it goes unnoticed. I find all this extremely stimulating and fertile: I have made it my subject of research.
The “Figurations anonymes” represent artists who express themselves partially or totally through the medium of mosaic. These are analog photographic prints on white glass or white gold mosaics. The subjects are completely anonymous: I do not mention their names in the titles of the works and their representation is evanescent. Only the surface of the mosaic can evoke the unique work of each of these artists and allow the most expert to identify them. Their photographic identity, already degraded by the irregular support of the mosaic, will disappear within a few centuries, a few millennia before the mosaic itself undergoes slow degradation.
Ultimately, “Consecratio/Abolitio nominis” reuses photographs of works from the previous series and combines them with the images used to make them. The result is digitally printed on new surfaces in marble mosaic or marble slabs, and has a rather indecipherable result, which you described in the critical text of the exhibition “Rappresentazioni” as a process of autophagy. After several requests from private individuals for portraits for the series “Figurations anonymes”, requests that I refused, it seemed to me that the meaning of this work was largely lost on the general public. It was therefore a question of insisting, coloring the images, as one would color an old war documentary, to bring this story and its protagonists closer to us, while attacking these images with solvents, hammers, sandpaper, chisels, drills, etc., and then restoring them, sometimes.
On Sunday, July 27, at 6:14 p.m., Daniele Torcellini wrote:
Benjamin, in his famous essay on technical reproducibility, writes that art is received in different ways, two of which, mutually opposed, are particularly significant: cult value and exhibition value. Art was created to respond to ritual, magical, spiritual, and cult needs. While originally it was more important for a work to exist than to be seen, over the course of history artistic practices have become emancipated from ritual and opportunities for exhibiting have increased. A half-length portrait is more exhibitable than a statue of a deity installed in a temple; a painted panel is more exhibitable than a mosaic or a fresco, writes Benjamin. And with photography, finally, the value of exhibibility completely dominates, as it is a medium that intrinsically lends itself to the multiplication of images.
I make this remark because I find Benjamin’s reference to mosaics and photography particularly interesting, as two opposing poles on an axis that ranges from the needs of worship to those of the display of a work of art. We could also paraphrase this differently by thinking of the fact that mosaics extend the work of art in time and photography in space, to frame your work, in which the tensions between mosaic and photography are explored both from the point of view of the nature of the media and from the point of view of the symbolic associations and chain of meanings, even deferred ones, to which the two media refer. But that is not all. Benjamin believes that one of the consequences of the technical reproducibility of the work of art is the loss of its aura, that is, the possibility of confronting the uniqueness of an artwork, with its concrete presence in a defined space and time. However, if in photography the value of displayability begins to completely replace cultural value, Benjamin writes, “the latter does not retreat without resistance. It occupies a last trench, which is the face of man. It is no coincidence that the portrait is at the center of early photographs. In the cult of remembering distant or deceased loved ones, the cultural value of the picture finds its last refuge. In the fleeting expression of a human face, from the first photographs, the aura emanates for the last time”[1].
In your work, you constantly deal with the presence and absence of the face, with the loss and recovery of identity, and you do so by combining mosaics and photography. You have also done so in this latest series of works, which you have presented in the form of an installation. You set up the mosaics in a very specific space and time. You deliberately limited access to one person at a time. You provided a candle to illuminate the works and the space itself. I would say that you wanted to recreate a highly sacred, albeit secular, experience, not as a nostalgic evocation of ancient glories but as a critical reflection on our current visual horizon, as you yourself write, inundated with selfies or photographic portraits that display stereotypical faces and bodies and pass before our eyes without leaving any trace. Before leaving the word to you, asking you to recount how this experience developed, I would like to make one last observation. For Benjamin, the consequences of technical reproducibility are different. The work loses its sacredness and its aura, but gains the possibility that images may have a political, collective, and revolutionary impact. Does your artistic action, suspended between the hic et nunc of the installation and the possibility of unlimited reproduction of the images and videos that document it and illustrate this very catalog via the web, have political or social implications?
On Monday, July 28, 2025, at 4:09 p.m., Clément Mitéran wrote:
I have long thought that claiming political significance for art was excessive presumption. A few years ago, I would have gasped when listening to Deleuze, when he stated in “Abécédaire” that philosophy “prevents stupidity from being as great as it would be if there were no philosophy; that is its splendor. We don’t realize what it would be like, just as if there were no arts, but the vulgarity of people… you know… When we say […] to create is to resist, it is effective, I mean, the world would not be what it is if there were no art, because then people would no longer be able to hold themselves together”. Although I am still not entirely convinced by Deleuze’s somewhat surprising statement, I must admit that I have nevertheless evolved on this point. Faced with the current social and political world, perhaps artistic practice serves at least to keep a light alive.
Sure, it is flickering. On the edge. But it is still something.
However, your question and your references to Benjamin force me to take a certain distance and consider things as they are today, almost a century after his famous publication. The producibility and reproducibility of images has developed exponentially in recent decades. At the same time, the production and perception of portraiture have undergone transformations, which I perceive as a renewed iconoclastic movement, stripping it of almost all its attributes, of all its aura (except, as always, in its last refuges). This evolution is accompanied by another intensification: the images produced and disseminated today are practically destined for single use, becoming immediately disposable. This is due both to the incessant scrolling on social media, where they disappear as soon as they appear, and to the far from certain reliability of hardware supports. As you also mention, these images extend into space, now also virtual, and last even less. But, as Michel Poivert pointed out to me, and to put it another way, there is a link between the photographic utopia of image reproducibility and the utopia of a mosaic that aims to make painting “eternal”, according to the expression attributed to Ghirlandaio. This antagonistic link continues to grow stronger, and the phenomenon described by Benjamin remains extraordinarily relevant; indeed, it has amplified.
This is where we stand.
The contemporary world is also preparing to undergo other profound transformations, which, in some respects, echo Benjamin’s analyses and which, in my opinion, need to be considered at this stage.
I will thus attempt a prospective exercise. From the point of view of production and reproduction, not only of images but also of matter, there is no reason, at least on a technological level (leaving aside economic and ecological issues), why humanoid robots equipped with AI could not, for example, autonomously create a Roman mosaic anywhere in the coming years. This will probably redefine the boundaries between craftsmanship, artistic craftmanship, and art. In essence, anything based on established rules that can be transferred to a machine can be reproduced by it. And these rules can be combined and mixed, offering, as is already the case, support for artistic production. Yet there is clearly something that eludes us and is unlikely to be replaced: the sensitivity and subjectivity of human beings, that is, of those who cultivate a passion for art and those who are artists. Only they, with these particular predispositions, can bring an artwork to life.
Starting from this, and considering the state of the portrait I have described, it seemed extremely appealing to me to attempt a very minimalist approach, returning to the origin, to the myth of Pliny.
The outline of the shadow projected by a candle on a wall, traced on that wall by a young woman whose lover was about to leave, in order to preserve his image, gives life to both painting and portrait. This very minimalist aspect of representation seemed necessary to me today. And even more than that: I wasn’t thinking of a form created by a body that would hide a projected light, but rather an animated double of the individual, a persistent immaterial memory, inspired by a definition of the shadow present in ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, and the Middle East.
The portrait could thus become an exploration of both material and immaterial identity, and this approach allowed me to reintroduce a dimension of wonder with regard to the act of portraiture itself, fully embracing its fascinating and enigmatic nature.
The wavering light of the candle then brought the single illumination of a person visiting the installation, without whom it would not have existed. Just as there are no mosaics or photographs without light. The precariousness of the lighting also became that of the portrait, of the animated double.
As for the tension and possible political and social implications generated by the very existence of such an exhibition between the hic et nunc of the installation and its presence in our contemporary temporality made up of reproduced and disseminated images, I must say that I placed myself above all in the position of a curious spectator of the effects that might be generated, and I was not disappointed. I was just a little concerned that it might be perceived as a spectacle, but fortunately that was not the case.
It was certainly a first experience, especially in Ravenna, where, perhaps for the first time in about a century, mosaics were seen illuminated by candlelight. I think I can already recognize some effects, although it would be interesting to repeat this experience elsewhere, because the location and the type of audience are certainly important.
First of all, finding oneself alone, in silence, with only a candle, in an exhibition space that is no longer a white cube, did not leave one indifferent. The attention paid and the intimate relationship with the works on display constituted, for most of the public, an experience of great intensity, a slowing down that, it seems to me, many of the exhibitions mounted today are no longer able to produce. I will always remember my visit to the Vatican Museums, filled with people taking a leisurely walk, sometimes stopping for a quick shot with their smartphones at an “Instagrammable” artwork. A veritable hell on earth. Perhaps I managed to shine a flickering light on the margins. But, once again, it is still something.
Afterwards, there were relatively few photos or videos of the installation posted on social media. Perhaps the exhibition format encouraged concentration; perhaps the low light available combined with the sensitivity of smartphone cameras discouraged some impulses. These two aspects – attention to oneself, one’s feelings, and to the works, and the difficulty of transforming them into reproducible images – constitute, in my opinion, the main social and political effects of such an installation.
What remains are the catalog, the photographs, and the videos that were made, which, in addition to the communication obligations related to the exhibition, should, in my opinion, serve above all as a reminder of an experience that is fundamentally unrepeatable, even by the same person, from one visit to the next.
On Monday, August 25, at 1:16 a.m., Daniele Torcellini wrote:
One of the most significant historical and artistic contributions on the subject of shadows is Victor Stoichita’s A Short History of the Shadow. From the origins of painting to Pop Art. Stoichita examines the symbolic, philosophical, and cultural meanings of the shadow, which are rooted in myth and run through literature and art history: the shadow is seen as the origin of painting and knowledge in the Antiquity; it is absent in sacred representations of the Middle Ages; it is useful for representing an illusory and perspective space in the Renaissance and a dramatic space with strong contrasts of light and shadow in the Baroque period; but the shadow is also an ambiguous and uncanny absence/presence and metaphor for identity; a double animated of the subject or such that it can reveal its truest essence in the 18th century; a metaphor for the unconscious; a precedent for photography and then, with the latter, it has the possibility of being reproduced; it is an ambiguous, unsettling double that acquires its own autonomy in contemporary art, starting with the shadows of the ready-mades that Duchamp stages. In your installation, many of these references seem to emerge and contaminate each other. Walking around with a candle in your hand, in your installation, you find yourself in the evocative position of someone illuminating shining and iridescent mosaic surfaces, with the whole range of glows that derive from them and that invest and modulate the surrounding space, creating a shadow of yourself behind you. But not only that. Also illuminated – as if searching for traces of identity that are irretrievably lost, ambiguous, present/absent, animated – are spectral silhouettes outlined both through the arrangement of the tiles and, in particular, through the use of photosensitive emulsions that you have blackened using analog photographic techniques. If mosaic is the realm of light and analog photography primarily produces shadows where it receives light, your work seems to me to bring a new and meaningful complexity to this polarized relationship, so as to make it the site for a subversion of our habitual and comfortable way of confronting the image of the human face, our own and that of others, through the microscopic grid of backlit pixels of our devices.
On Saturday, August 30, at 6:20 p.m., Clément Mitéran wrote:
Without a doubt, it is both the relationship with the image and the relationship with the face that is disrupted, compared to contemporary modes of production and perception. The use of the chemigram, which frees me from the photographic negative, allows me, from a practical point of view, to distance myself from a “realistic” concern in the production of the image. I can freely use the photographic emulsion to bring out the grays and blacks, or leave gaps, which will interact with the pattern of the mosaic. To a certain extent, I am not particularly interested in the image itself. It is rather in this relationship between mosaic and photographic material that these portraits are constructed.
Nevertheless, the very use of photography tends to make us perceive the representation in a realistic way. Photography was born in a context that pushed towards this goal of realism, and our culture still associates it with this idea, even unconsciously. Perhaps our brains are wired to perceive the type of representation that photography produces in this way.
Essentially, I move away from the image, from realism, I construct a portrait with matter and, at the same time, the desire to reconstruct a trace, to fill in the ambiguities and absences, belongs to the viewer, and is all the more intense the more they are in contact with the photography.
I thought there was a possible way to make the portrait exist, that is, to bring out an identity, despite the strong opposition and aesthetic barriers that exist today to counteract this desire.
The absence of a “comfortable” image has the effect of destabilizing our ability to interpret, and shifts the artistic object produced into another register: it gives it another status.
In addition to Stoichita’s reading, on the good advice of Eleonora Savorelli, an additional source of reflection was provided by Aaron Tugendhaft’s The Idols of ISIS, from Assyria to the Internet. I was interested then, and still am, in past and contemporary forms of iconoclasm. While some of these methods are repeated almost identically thousands of years later, there have also been some developments. The point that I think is important to emphasize is the constant tension between iconophilia and iconoclasm, even if there are sometimes periods of stability that may lead us to believe that agreement on these issues is possible. As an aside, our civilization is marked by a surprising unawareness of its iconoclastic impulses.
In any case, it is always the sacred status, object of the representation, that creates problems. Music, painting, sculpture, etc., are accused of diverting attention from the sacred object, in that they constitute images, intellectual if not material ones, that are not properly that sacred object. They divert, in the literal sense.
Hence, my portraits, devoid of any clear intention to produce an image, shift the status of sacredness, normally attributed to their subject, particularly in the case of portraits, towards the material or intellectual objects they constitute. Rather than diverting attention from the sacred, I have sought, by creating a work without an image, to divert sacredness in favor of the portrait as a genre, and mosaic and photography as media. Thus they are sacralized, as they are devoid of the Idea of the image.
It should be noted, for those who have not seen the works, that the absence of an image is obviously not a material absence of the work, nor is it the absence of a portrait, or a complete shift to abstraction.
But beyond a non-mobilization of technical means that would allow the production of a realistic and immediately recognizable face, the image becomes, in my creative process, an accessory, pushed into the background. The matter and its use, which can probably be defined as the “medium”, are at the center of these works and constitute, I believe, a starting point for their understanding.
The sacredness I am referring to is not religious in nature, nor is it linked to the hypothesis of a Platonic Idea, but rather, to borrow a Latin definition, it concerns that which cannot be touched without becoming contaminated, or without contaminating. It seems to me that this also corresponds well to the status of mosaic as a medium, to portraiture in our contemporary world, to experimental photography.
The magical aspect of the sacred also echoes Stoichita’s hypothesis on Pliny the Elder’s transcription of the myth of the birth of painting. The latter would not have considered an approach linked to archaic Greece or ancient Egypt (and more broadly to the Middle East) which sees the terracotta object, resulting from the tracing of the portrait of the beloved, brought to the temple after the announcement of his death, transforming the object into the animated double of that individual.
That said, to get closer to the meaning, influences, and implications you mentioned, I don’t think there is a better way to enjoy it than to engage with this installation directly, physically.
[1] W. Benjamin, L’opera d’arte nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica, Einaudi, Turin 1998, p. 27; or. ed. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, drei studien zur Kunstsoziologie, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Maine, c1955.
A short guide to a vision
By Sabina Ghinassi
“Perhaps only in a world of blind people will things be what they really are.”
José Saramago, Blindness, 1995
We arrived late. Eleonora and Giulia had already left on their bicycles after a day in the cold, taking care, like two little Gatekeepers, of the comings and goings through the small door. The door has always been there, like Edgar Allan Poe’s stolen letter: obvious and yet hidden.
No one notices it. If they do, the most likely interpretation is that it is the warehouse/storage room of the bar-pastry shop next door. A mundane place.
Instead, it is a secret passageway between the folds of the city, one of the removed parts that continue to exist while pretending not to be there.
All cities have several of them, serenely and duly concealed. They tell and open up other stories.
I think it is fortunate, from a certain point of view: the gift of this exhibition/strange event/immersive and emerging installation (like Clément Mitéran’s mosaic works) is also that of losing one’s usual bearings, of making everyone return to being a beginner in vision, forced to flânerie, to get lost, even if one believes to have the answers.
A privilege.
There is no time to prepare, gather information.
Clément Mitéran, artist-philosopher, is the demiurge of probable visions; in pointing them out, he embraces the unpredictability of possibilities, the reckless opening of other doors, seeking them out and accompanying you there.
When you enter the space, you entrust yourself; you welcome the enchantment and the uncanny, you walk the edge, sinking into comfort and discomfort, necessarily taking on the responsibility of being the protagonist of a story, your story in there, another space, womb or cave, refuge or prison, beginning and end.
In the darkness, there are those who are afraid and those who feel protected and safe.
Entry is for one person at a time.
You are given a carriage lantern with a flickering candle light, halfway between Jack the Ripper looking for his next victim in Whitechapel and the Hermit of the Tarot Readers White (this happened to me).
Then they let you in. Alone.
You may:
feel completely alone
experience blindness and regain your sight
learn to look again, allowing yourself plenty of time
decode, giving yourself the freedom to construct your own story through images
live your limits
fall in love with the shadows
fall in love with the light
fall in love with gold, precious and pulsating, rising slowly from the black wings
(the English ‘to fall in love’ resembles a romantic fall into the things of the world)
falling into the gold that vibrates, that beats like a heart and trembles with light and shadow, that crackles with fire and becomes the soul-skin of a world reborn
invent the images you see
forget them and go back (to see them differently)
invent the sounds you hear
sharpen all your senses
stay in Plato’s cave and understand nothing
stay in the cave refuge of Amaterasu, the Japanese Sun Goddess, and not want to leave
mistake fireflies for lanterns to discover that they are new creatures, firefly-lanterns in fact, and they are beautiful
become Borges’ Droctulft and Jung’s imaginative Baptistery of the Arians
perceive that “in our house there are many spaces besides the room we are in, and that other people live there”, as James Hillmann said: the other people are there, on the damp walls, and you can see them for a brief moment, perhaps even talk to them
go out to see the stars again and feel nostalgia for that strange place
be certain that Clément Mitéran is a great artist and be grateful for an experience that is not just an exhibition, but an intense journey through the dense time of vision.
Which reconnects the gaze to the heart, to the body and to all the nights and dawns of the world.
Clément Mitéran, or of the meaning of portraiture between photography and mosaic
By Daniele Torcellini
The German philosopher Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay dedicated to the relationship between art and technique, writes that the reception of art occurs according to different modalities, of which two of these, opposed to each other, are of particular importance: «with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work1». The art was born to answer the ritual requirements, magic, spiritual and cultural, emancipating itself gradually from the rite to be always more exposed. The mosaic, during its emblematic development in the early Christian era and the Byzantine era is by excellence the technique by which the Christian aesthetic is incarnated. Its cultural value is firmly anchored, it is functional for liturgical celebrations. The materials that constitute it, tesserae covered with gold leaf, glass paste and marble, guarantee maximum efficiency to make the Christian icons shine with light and color, giving presence to God, Christ, the Virgin, the saints and the angels in the sacred space of the basilica. Following Benjamin in his reasoning, in opposition to the mosaic is the photography. Technique with delicate materiality which, applied to the reproduction of the art by the multiplication of the copies that allows the negative-positive process, deprives of aura what is reproduced. For Benjamin the aura is that intense experience that can only be derived from the direct confrontation with the object and its materiality, in a real space. The aura is the unique appearance of a distance, the inapproachable character of the cultural image.
The technical reproducibility of the art is destined to accentuate the value of exhibition to the detriment of the cultual value, with consequences that Benjamin perceives as being of political order. A long reflection opens then, of which the German philosopher draws as much the negative implications as the innovative aspects, followed by an important outcome: if with the photography the value of exhibition begins to substitute itself from all points of view to the cultual value, writes Benjamin, «But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuse for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face1 ».
Mosaic, photography and human faces are central to Clément Mitéran’s artistic practice. The parisian artist, in three intense series o works produced over the course of more than a decade, explores themes related to representation through portraiture, gradually shifting his interest to an analysis of the meaning and implications of representing through portraiture, referring to themes of recognition, as well as both loss and memory of identity.
At the beginning of his career, Mitéran confronts the practice of the portrait in mosaic, from photographic images of important and internationally recognized personalities in the literary and philosophical field. Field of expression already used by artists who use the mosaic as a means of expression for the amplification of meaning it produces, as is the case of Leonardo Pivi with his series of covers of popular magazines, fashion, music, politics, art, redefined through interventions in micro-mosaic – Mitéran’s mosaic portraits present a modern and contemporary mythography that is as much the shared expression of our Western culture as the mirror of interests and personal inclinations. Mitéran consecrates our myths and his myths through mosaic, rematerializing in the form of unique works destined to last in time the digital multiplicity of photographic images, mostly from the internet. The photograph extends in space. The mosaic extends in time. The portraits of Charles Baudelaire, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Houellebecq constitute however for Mitéran a first approach to a reflection on the nature of the artistic language and the employed techniques, as proves the emphasis with which the material of the mosaic is exploited, with an obvious and sought discontinuity of textures, sizes and arrangement of the materials of the mosaic, stony or vitreous, so as to draw our attention not only towards what (or who) is represented, but also on how, what is represented, is incarnated in the material.But it is not only the mosaic that is the object of Mitéran’s analysis. The themes that revolve around the portrait are exploited by also exploring the language of photography, declined in a wide spectrum of possibilities. The first cycle of works ends with a portrait of Michel Houellebecq – melancholic expression and cigarette in hand – made from a photograph taken by Mitéran himself.
In the second series of artworks, from an approach with a post-photographic flavor of collecting images on the web, Mitéran makes follow to the techniques and processes of analog and digital photography, an approach of
retro-experimental type. In the manner of the early 18th century pioneers who grappled with the chemical and physical properties of silver halide for processes to be calibrated and results often disappointing – but emblematic if not explicitly researched – Mitéran extends the photosensitive emulsion onto complex and diverse mosaic surfaces to print portraits of artists around him. In the series Figures of the modern and contemporary mythology, photographs and mosaics find a conciliation in the continuation of action which places the mosaic like conclusion of a work of reinterpretation of a photographic image; in this second series, the artist underlines on the contrary the contrast generated by two
media through opposite couples: image/support; subject/background; light-darkness of the faces/monochromy of the texture; continuity/discontinuity; dematerialized nature of the photographic image/strong evidence of the mosaic materials; ephemeral/durable; rapid chemical reaction/long-term manual work. The results are evanescent images of frontal pose, minimalist expressions and deliberately on the borders of ID photography, reminiscent of the Portraits, Blue Eyes and Other Portraits series of an author particularly attentive to research on photographic language such as Thomas Ruff, all the more so with the use of faded funeral black and white and for the practice of photographic montage to which Mitéran sometimes resorts, to create hybrids in which two faces are as one. The identities of the protagonists of the Anonymous figurations series become blurred, lose their ability to be recognized, or are recognizable only with difficulty and by a small group of people who belong to what could be described as a micro-community, a niche that shares common interests and whose relational and social dynamics thats Mitéran explores. Each initial photographic negative is destined to be incarnated in a single copy on the surface of a mosaic that seems reticent to accommodate the chiaroscuro nuances of the photograph. On the other hand, the photographic images are beautifully mismatched to the textural variations of the underlying mosaics, except that they are made by recomposing the style of the artists whose portraits Mitéran makes, opening up a potential risk of loss of identity that concerns the portraitist, Mitéran himself, rather than the one who is the object of the portrait.
In the first series, the subjects and modalities of representation are central to the work, in the second the motive of the choice of subjects is important, but these do not emerge explicitly. Without any spirit of self-commiseration – on the contrary, it is rather a sophisticated irony – the series is born with the objective of showing and at the same time hiding the face of the artists who work with the medium of mosaic, a technique and language with a glorious past, whose presence in contemporary art practices is discontinuous, not fully recognized and often undervalued.
The third series of works, Consecratio/Abolitio nominis, insofar as it shares the underlying intentions of Anonymous figurations, opens up to other implications of a more general nature. In the Roman law of the republican and then imperial period, the abolitio nominis is a legal sanction that deprives the condemned of the possibility of transmitting his praenomen to his heirs and foresees the erasure of his name in all the public space, leading also to the destruction of the effigies of the condemned. The emperors recognized for their value are consecrated by the institution of the apotheosis. From Roman law to the present day, many practices of erasure of names and images have succeeded one another, in opposition to the forms of exaltation of the personality, from the iconoclasm of the Byzantine period and the use of the parietal mosaic as one of the most imposing forms of celebration of the imperial power, until the present binomial opposing the actions of the so-called cancel culture and of the influencers conquering a hyper-visibility with clicks. We live in a technologically advanced society that has quite sophisticated instruments for the diffusion of images; in recent years many of us have obstinately seen our own faces and those of others in digital frames during the video calls or videoconferences that punctuated the working days during the pandemic; the success of social networks like Instagram and Tik Tok is largely founded on the presence of faces and bodies on permanent display; against the backdrop of articulated and complex dynamics that have to do with the ways in which, through the images that represent us, we relate to ourselves and to the others, transporting the past into the future, Mitéran digitally and physically assaults the photographic portraits of the Anonymous Figurations series. The artist creates works that further accelerate the ambiguity of identity, between impossible recognition due to digital and physical interventions and attempts of restoration. From the digital point of view, Mitéran acts in the perimeter of actions of photographic post-production that are, after all, also of pre-production, if we consider the successive prints of the obtained images. These elaborations are obtained by superimposing, mixing and alternating the photographs of departure and the photographs of the finished works of the previous series, in a process of auto-appropriation, which is also a process of autophagy, and which leads to paradoxical results of photographs of mosaics and faces printed on polished mosaics, or on marble plates, in a way that one doesn’t know anymore which is what. From the material point of view, Mitéran, after the printing of the portraits, intervenes with destructive intentions that recall some of the results of Arnulf Rainer’s work.
In our case, however, it is not a question of graphic or pictorial signs but of hammer blows, drilling, abrasion, corrosive acids used to erase the faces, but also, in the opposite direction, of filling in the gaps and renovations that recall the practices of restoration and conservation through the history of works damaged by iconoclastic actions3. In the series Consecratio/Abolitio nominis form and content thus collapse into a formless agglomerate4 that reaches its peak with Ricoperto, in which of the mosaic and the face, but also of what is materially realized and what is photographically printed, only indistinguishable shreds remain. Mitéran’s work is an incessant and obsessive process in which attempts at recomposition and decomposition are intertwined, leading to the collapse of identity and memory, as much of the techniques employed as of the subjects portrayed, in search, one might think, of a possibility of redefining the aura of the representation of the human face embodied in matter, even when the face is erased, and even more so when it is erased.
Clément Mitéran, Représentations
by Renée Malaval
“Mosaic is at the beginning of the exploration of its possibilities, in the way painting was during the 20th century. After disappearing from the artistic scene during a few centuries, it is making up for lost time.”, explains Clément Mitéran, by showing it in a majestic way in his Représentations exhibit, from June 14th to September 9th of 2022 at the Pavillon des Arts et du Patrimoine, in Châtenay-Malabry.
“Réprésentations” is a two-meaning notion: it is about representation, because the exhibition is about portrait and Clément Mitéran represents et renders people’s lines and characteristics. Those personas who have in one way or another, crossed Clément’s path. The artist wished to present them to us again from a different angle, as a full ensemble enriched with a new chapter and new images.
This exhibit with about 50 portraits classified by the artist himself in 3 different series, that were birthed over time and are all carried out in parallel to each other. The first one, initiated in 2008, is the Figures de la mythologie moderne et contemporaine (Figures of modern and contemporary mythology), the second, starting in 2015, brings together Figurations anonymes (Anonymous Figurations), and the third, entitled Consecratio/Abolitio nominis presented here for the first time. Three different paths, on which the 30 year-old artist has taken us during the past 15 years, exploring portraits in a pioneering way, placing it at the center of his artistic research.
These portraits bring photography and mosaic together, using a sophisticated and unique technique by which both mediums blend in a unique way, giving each series a different approach to the portrait as an art form.
These words, portrait, photography, mosaic, bring immediately to mind images and names. The mosaic portraits presented at the Naples National Archaeological Museum, in Italy from the byzantine era that we can see on Ravenna’s monument’s walls, the mosaics of Gaudi and many others.
However, by discovering the work of Clément Mitéran, our convictions are rattled. The pieces are beautiful, esthetic, with different shades of greys, whites, white gold, almost attaining monochrome, with a few chosen colors from a pallet of burned tints, showing personas with imprecise delimitations, soaking in an intemporal atmosphere.
Figures of modern and contemporary mythology
The artist shows three portraits of this series, Charles Baudelaire, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Houellebecq. These are classical portraits, on marble and smalti. There is a very pictural style to them, realistically represented, Baudelaire standing, Houllebecq seated in a chair, and close-up for Deleuze. The spectator’s eye goes from a figurative angle to a global reading of the piece where texture, material and composition work together. Thanks to the reflection and refraction of the light on different parts of each portrait, the persona’s characteristics become abstract.
In order to make Houllebecq’s portrait, made in 2015 and highlight of his research, Mitéran met the writer and took preliminary pictures, prior to undertaking the mosaic portrait. His work took about 4 months. “If I decide to allocate that much time to such a complicated technique, I believe no other medium can associateso many elements with such liberty. And that the time is worth the result.”, explains the artist. By choosing a path that reinvents the historical portrait, Clément Mitéran reassures Michel Houellbecq, who was worried about its progressive disappearing in art. The personas Mitéran chose to represent are mythical figures of modern culture. The artist persues this series in his workshop, with a research around personalities.
Figurations anonymes
The exhibit reveals about 30 portraits from Figurations anonymes. Mitéran approaches this new chapter of his research in 2015, by suppressing film development and replacing it by development directly on the mosaic. The surface of the white Venetian smalti or white gold
tessels is made photosensitive beforehand. A split-second moment is then imprisoned on a potentially eternal surface. The dialogue between photography’s instantaneity and mosaic’s durability is unlocked.
The portrait is then printed on a fragmented surface. This choice of medium may surprise, or seem unfit to portrait printing, but it is, in reality, what gives the work its vigor and power. Abstract shapes emerge from the facial features. By reuniting mosaic and photography in his creations, Mitéran opposes photography’s impermanence to mosaic’s permanent aspect. An art, which embodies eternity by excellence (“Mosaic is the true painting of eternity.”, to cite Ghirlandaio’s famous words), another who’s purpose is to capture eternity. The first durable & encapsulated in a timeless manor, the later perishable and ephemeral. Two mediums who could seem foreign to each other but who can be brought together because both are revealed by light. If it seems obvious for all of us that photography is linked to light, let us be reminded of the inscription in the byzantine chapel of Ravenne, Aut lux nata est aut capta hic libera régnât that we can translate by “Either light was born here, or it was captured, it reigns here with liberty”.
Figurations anonymes features artists who use mosaic as a medium, men and women from different generations, origins, who Clément has had the chance to meet. The artist himself photographed the mosaists, imposing a frontal and inexpressive posture, as we can see on ID pictures.
The series Monstre (les monstres), Spectre (les spectres), Trace (les traces), Simulacre (les simulacres), and Lintoleum flow in front of the spectator. Lintoleum is the portrait of the Polish artiste Matylda Tracewska; it was realized with an Opus reticulatum technique with a subtil play on the variations of the tassels which delimitate the face. In Simulacrum V, the artist made the portrait of the Japanese artist Takako Hirai. He chose a venetian smalti with a white gold surface, which evoques the artistic treasure the artist is building, in contradiction with her fragile social situation, by sacrificing her personal life and devoting herself to her lifeswork while living in Italy. The Scarti features Aude Fourrier and Sarah Vasini, and is made of salvaged materials, echoing their work. In Trace I, which paints Felice Nittolo’s portrait, the placement of the tassels are byzantine inspired.
Sometimes, we have the fleeting feeling we recognize someone, but it is just an impression, as we move, the portrait mutates, we can only see a few characteristics, such as in Monstre II for example: the portrait shows the upper part of the face of a member of the CaCO3 group, associated with another member’s beard. In this series of Monstre, the spectator thinks he can recognize faces when they are fictions.
Clément Mitéran mentions these artists’ status in contemporary society : however not as a celebration. The artists are made anonymous by the choice of processing an image on a mosaic. With time, the impression of the picture will fade, the portrait will disappear and only the mosaic will remain. What will come out of these portraits is the specificity of each artist’s work, their artistic identity. The artist doesn’t celebrate his colleagues but pays tribute to them. He represents them as they are in our society, in the current world of culture, invisible, diluted in a contemporary reality, anonymous.
Consecratio/abolitio nominis
18 portraits are presented in the third series. Antique Rome designated by abolitio nominis- expression we can translate by suppressing the name- sentenses pronounced post mortem. By extension, the expression is used for any post-mortem convictions, designating a systematic annulation: destruction, decapitation, resculpturing statues, erasing of
names on inscriptions, on coins, portraits…
The oldest example is Erostate’s, who set fire to Artemis’ temple. His only motivation was to become famous. The Ephesians condemned him to not have his name pronounced anymore. It is because of a historian who mentioned his name that he is still known today. His act qualifies him as the first terrorist. Roman emperors frequently erased their predecessors’ names. However, by wanting to eliminate known figures, the Romans preserved and reinforced the myths of a large number of people they had damned. Erased people were sometimes remembered as martyrs. When the statues were simply buried, instead of being burned or destroyed, they were then discovered later in time. In the Sant’Appolinare nuovo basilica, in Ravenna, some people were also erased from mosaics. During the Byzantine empire (726-843), there was a destruction of images, because of their political and religious characteristics. It was the same process for the Hagia Sophia mosaics. During the Renaissance, we can mention the damnatio memoriae, the covering of Marino Faliero’s portrait, of family members from the Pazzi family in Florence, of Jan Hus…
The modern world still uses these practices today, throughout the denial of genocides. The decapitation of Josephine’s statue in 1991, in Fort-de-France in Martinique, the “cancel- culture” acts: many erasing modalities still exist. We wonder today if the terrorists’ names should be mentionned, in order to not participate in the martyrs glorification. Everything should be between consecratio and damnatio, and these back-and-forths are present in Mitéran’s works.
The technique he elaborated for the realization of the Consecratio/Abolitio nominis is quite complex and needs few successive operations. It rests on the printing of a picture on a surface. This surface is either a marble plate (the final work appears without a frame), or a surface in mosaic made by the artist (the final work then appears in a black frame); we call it a classical mosaic, with a black epoxy joint, with andamento which differs from a mosaic to another, and asks for extra sanding work. The printed image is made thanks to a special software, with an original photography treatment. It is obtained by the superposition of two pictures, the original photography in color, and the correspondent Figuration anonyme’s. The artist then does his touch-ups. Once the picture is printed on the chosen surface, the artist then intervenes as a mosaist, in a unique way for each artwork, echoing the main subject. It isn’t about touching-up the surface, but a work motivated by aesthetics. It is then up to the spectator to detect the artist’s intentions throughout the work.
The artist brings up the idea of restoration : restoration of mosaics has become a necessity but the cost has nothing to do with the small investment given to contemporary mosaic. Mitéran’s interventions on mosaics are multiple: white restoration, tassels in Opus tesselatum, Opus vermiculatum, new faces, monochrome masks, black and white reminding mortual iconography. He can also intervene on the marble plate such as how he did with Kintsugi, by using gold tassels. Ricoperto shows the artist’s next researches.
The first series, Figures of modern and contemporary mythology, shows the consecration, the apotheosis, the glory, and the tribute paid to artists known as mythical figures of our society. Throughout the two next series, we can witness a phenomenon of invisibility, and then tension between consecration and omission. What is the artist trying to say to us ? He questions us, he tells us about contemporary mosaic, about its actors: this is the essence of this corpus of works. He tells us that contemporary mosaic artists are “the invisibles” of the art world : by the profound inequality they are victims of, very far from entering well-known galeries, national museums, by lack of consideration, medias, and art critics. The artist denounces the precariousness and anonymous situation. It is a silent beg for recognition that the artist expresses by the programmed erasing of the faces. Will they forever stay anonymous ?
When photography disappears, the mosaists’ faces will fade. The mosaic will be the only trace left, the one that the artist will have created. The ongoing characteristic of mosaic enables us to imagine the historization of the works, and that of the artists.
The actual cultural world refuses to give artists the glory they deserve. But according to history, of victims of the abolitio nominis, tables could turn, given the quality of the works, and as it was the case for Erostate, they could finally get the glory they are entitled to. Clément Mitéran presents works which brings up a lot of questions, and that he wishes to pursue. Which mystery does the opposition between short-lived photography and eternal mosaic hide ? Does the art of portraiture belong to reality or fiction ? Portraying is a work about identity, affirming a certain status, an existence: in his portraits, Clément Mitéran asks an underlying question about the contemporary artist’s status. Who is the contemporary artist ? Should he erase himself, and become a simple executant ? By choosing to work on portraits, the artist wonders about his place in society, insisting on the distortion between the absence of portraits, and the numerous invasive selfies on smartphones and social media. Those portraits don’t tell anything about their authors or the context. Mitéran chose to make portraits with a specific technique, characterized by a very slow process, revealing the intimate part of each artist, its artistic identity. It belongs to the small world of young artists who bring unestimated value and future to mosaic.