What you see is not what you think it is.
Cinq Secondes Plus Tard, Julien Berthier, 2017.
This painting, exhibited recently at Le Portique (Le Havre's centre for contemporary art) is actually part of a work by contemporary artist Julien Berthier titled Cinq Secondes Plus Tard, 2017, (Five Seconds Later) which could be described as an attempt to inscribe the passing of time into the medium of paint. The artist acquired some 19th century landscape paintings and commissioned a restorer to alter them in such a way that they capture the scene represented 5 seconds later. The restorer drifted clouds along, extended shadows and modified the positions of characters.
Cinq Secondes Plus Tard, Julien Berthier, 2017.
The piece is conceptual in as much as the viewer cannot detect the alterations that were painted over the original scenes. It is also conceptual for Berthier is giving instructions to perform the work and as such his hand doesn't execute the work. Willingly, the artist distances himself from the image produced and offers the beginning of a discussion about authorship. As an idea, it is quite poetic to fast forward a scene that took place,or was represented, 150 years ago. Berthier starts a direct dialogue with the past, which is compressed in the object of the painting. This, in addition to the physical act of painting embedded in Five Seconds Later, opens up philosophical discussions about the nature of time. And it seems as if, Berthier starts this discussion with his own instruction-based approach as a way of finding the temporality suited for his own practice.
Cinq Secondes Plus Tard, Julien Berthier, 2017.