16 mm on DVD, color, stereo sound, 8’33” (2004). Excerpt

Production Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains

Pentimenti’s starting point is my fascination for the equestrian portrait of Philippe IV painted by Diego Velazquez (El Prado museum, Madrid). Organized in a circular editing, the film shows a horse with its cavalier passing constantly a horizontal plane of a nocturnal scene. The camera is fixed and frames the repeated crossing of the couple through the viewer’s field all along the length of the film. In Pentimenti, reflections on pose and on the process of image composition are related to other themes as body posture and manners in which dressage becomes a never – ending process about instruction and learning, learning and obeying. As central to portrait genre, pose becomes a metaphor of the spatial and temporal tension built up in the composition of an image in which several layers of corrections, displacements and replacements of the painted objects show the changing – repented – mind of the artist in the process of painting.