LOUIS OUELLET
Candid Eye
2013
Biography
A philosophy professor, Louis Ouellet has pursued an artistic path as a “professional amateur” since 1982. Experimental film, audio-visual installations, new music, sound environments for theatre, digital devices generating automatic music for piano or sound sources—these are the fields in which the artist has investigated the concepts of such theoreticians and artists as Leibniz, Wittgenstein, Duchamp, Serres, Deleuze, Mallarmé and Cage, or established certain procedures of his own invention: conceptual, mathematic or graphic. The artist was a founding member of BRUIT TTV and Obscure, where he programmed the musique actuelle section. He has received commissions from the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Radio-Canada, Arbo Cyber and Productions Recto-Verso. He has also created projects in close collaboration with Jocelyn Robert and Mériol Lehmann. For several years, he has been a member of Avatar’s Board of Directors.
About the work
Candid Eye is a wink at film history and technique. In the early 1980s, I took an experimental film course in Paris, where I had to do various stylistic exercises under the title of Candid Eye In/On/Of Paris. I conceived the idea of a flicker film, which remained at the stage of a rough flipbook, since it would have taken too much time and technical equipment to make a video. For the 20th anniversary of Avatar, I took this project out of my drawer, convinced that it could be completed in a few hours—as it was, thanks to the mastery of Mériol Lehmann of Avatar!
In artistic terms, Candid Eye is based on a simple drawing (the candid eye), where four zones of four different colours plus black combine in random—and almost infinite—fashion to form configurations succeeding each other over four different time periods. Viewers therefore have to keep watching for a long time before seeing, in succession, five monochrome images. But it does happen!
What is presented here is a finished version of the film in which, for twelve minutes, viewers can amuse themselves by seizing the moments in which the four zones are the same colour at the same time—in the wink of an eye!