Anticipating the artist’s participation in the 53rd Venice Biennale, the MAN in Nuoro hosts the first Italian anthology of Mark Lewis (Hamilton, Canada, 1958). At the Biennale Lewis was chosen to represent his country of origin, Canada, with cinematographic works created in 2009, while at the MAN he will be present with a broad review of the most important works of the period 1998-2008.

After having practiced photography and created several installations in public spaces, Lewis turned his attention to the moving image and, starting from the mid-1990s, began to explore the languages ​​and forms of cinema with the aim of questioning its history and conventions. His works, often created in cinemascope and transferred to DVD, have been shown in all the major international exhibitions which, over the years, have thematized the growing interest of contemporary art in the cinematographic medium and, in short, Lewis has become one of the most representative authors among those who use cinema in the artistic field.

In the spirit of the first Lumière films, Lewis’ works, often characterized by a continuous shot without editing, which restores a unitary moment of space and time, are projected in the form of sequence shots, directly on the walls of the exhibition space. Each work, created with the technical means of professional cinema (crew, actors, 35 mm film), far exceeds the production necessary for the creation of a video, but the result is never a film in the traditional sense of the term: none in fact, it tells a story about them and their duration rarely exceeds 5 minutes.

Through subtle camera movements (zoom, travelling) and taste for detail, the artist plays with different layers of information and established visual codes, thus testing the viewer’s attention span and inducing him to watch the film several times to learn all its implications and mysterious complexity. Wonderful operations of deconstruction of traditional cinematographic language, his films projected in a continuous cycle demand to be learned in the manner of visual works, contributing to breaking down the boundary line that for a long time kept the respective domains of cinema and contemporary art separate.

True visual intrigues, devoid of explicit narration, these short and silent films do not limit themselves to exploring the formal conventions of the seventh art, but are interested in the “cinematic” aspects of the world in which we live, in which the technologies of the moving image have radically transformed spatial and temporal perception. In this regard, the artist speaks of “permanent cinema”.

Often in his cinematographic installations focused on derelict and abandoned places, ruins of modernist utopia or timeless landscapes marked by the passage of light, shooting methods, framing cuts, camera movements give the image an intensity and a dimension of extraneousness that it continually oscillates the relationship between the identity of what we see and the perception we have of it, referring to the pictorial and photographic tradition that has shaped the sensitivity of the Western gaze.

Whether he uses the still or moving image, Lewis is always interested in “what remains behind us when the world shifts, or seems to shift, in another direction”, an “after” that allows him the greatest freedom of investigation, without any time constraints.

The object of Lewis’ research is not only exotic landscapes or impossible environments, but the places of everyday life that the artist narrates with the aim of highlighting their strength, power and extraordinary nature, characteristics that are, if you know how to see them , even of the most apparently usual or “banal” places. Behind the appearance – Mark Lewis seems to tell us – there is not the thing itself but the gaze. It is therefore the latter that his works are aimed at. They do not “represent” but “make something present” through the interdiction of their “eloquence” and their “transparency”.

The Pitch 1998, Central 1999, Smithfield 2000, North Circular 2000, Algonquin Park September 2001, Algonquin park Early March 2002, Children’s Games 2002, Harper Rd 2003, Downtown, Tilt, Zoom, Pan 2005, Rush Hour 2005, Quesnay: Pan and Zoom , 2005, Spadina, Reverse Dolly, Zoom, Nude 2006, Golden Rod 2006, Rear Projection (Molly Parker) 2006, 5262 Washington Blvd 2008, Brichlayers Arms 2008