For the frst time since his widely acclaimed exhibition in the Vienna Secession in 2008, PHILIPPE DECRAUZAT is exhibiting in an Austrian gallery. The primary elements in his thinking are theories and discourse on spatial and audio-visual perception and the resulting research in sound and flm. His paintings are static representations of motion, time and spatiality. This links him with Étienne-Jules Marey, French physiologist, doctor and researcher, who in 1872 frst attempted to record movements graphically on light-sensitive paper, and thus to visualise the temporal components of motion sequences. With the aid of recording instruments, these were traced on the paper as white lines on a black ground: this was the birth of chronophotography, predecessor of the moving picture, known as flm. Inspired by Marey's book La machine animal (1873), Californian Governor Leland Stanford hired self-taught photographer Eadweard Muybridge to produce studies of motion sequences with special chronographic cameras. The infuence of these frst motion studies of 1878 by Muybridge/Marey on subsequent generations of artists is still undiminished, having inspired Marcel Duchamp's Nude descending a Staircase, no. 2, Francis Bacon as well as special-efects artists in the flm industry (Tim Macmillan, Matrix). PHILIPPE DECRAUZAT's works Forcing Meaning to the Edge are precisely composed arrangements of 30 black lines painted with a brush on a shaped canvas. By means of optical illusion, they appear three-dimensional.

philippe decrauzat