The gaze that Karen Trask casts on notions of absence and emptiness challenges the theoretical charge of these highly referential concepts. In a pared down vocabulary in which the colour white has an undeniable symbolic reach, the artist focuses on the passing of time and investigates existence in duration. If writing has always been central to Trask's practice, Histoires de lumières proposes a videographic extension of it to engage the viewer in a reading that is both reflective and contemplative.  A first video, created during a residency in Paris, is projected on a corner wall in the exhibition space and shows shadows filmed in a room near the Seine. The fleeting and fragmented character of these shadows in no way reveals that this is a nocturnal filming of the play of light produced by the bateaux-mouches that travel the famous waterway. Between these shifting images an anonymous silhouette regularly appears standing close to the window. These obscure and intangible apparitions combined with the circular rhythm of the editing and the soundtrack bring the central theme of the installation to the surface: rien (nothing). This word, which is multiplied and cut out in a piece of thin white paper, figures on the adjacent wall as a silent, almost transparent reminder of what this is really about. As the artist underlines: “To explore nothing one needs “almost-nothing” means.” It is also in this sense that the recording of the evanescent light refers to a presence whose ephemeral character ineluctably leads to the idea of absence. The last video work, in which one can observe the slow passage of a ray of sunlight on the palm of a hand, uses measured poetry to suggest a form of causality between light, duration and erasure. Taken as a whole, Trask's installation loses no time in its call for a philosophy of the present.
AS, trans BAS
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