Pierre Bismuth is a French artist and filmmaker whose work is based on appropriation from various common cultural production forms. His work examines our perception of outer reality by destabilizing reading codes, thus transforming the familiar into the unfamiliar. Using subtle humor and minimal interventions into content, the meaning of which seems obvious, Bismuth sabotages the appropriated material's logic, thus disrupting the viewer's attention and shifting the works meaning into another direction. - Following the right hand of Ingrid Bergman in 'Notorious', (2007)
is part of a larger group of works connected to Bismuth's interest in cinema. Using the 1949 spy film Notorious (1949) as the point of departure of the work, the image depicts a still from the famous movie starring Ingrid Bergman and Gary Grant. The abstract drawing, an irregular black line, reminiscent of a child-like scribble, conceals parts of the image and traces Bismuth's attempt to carefully follow and transcribe the right-hand movements of Ingrid Bergman from the beginning of the movie to the moment the image was taken. Despite its initial randomness, this tangle of lines is, in fact, meaningful and inherently personal, as it captures the gesture of an iconic actress. On the one hand, the work reflects Bismuth's subtle approach to the notion of the artist's myth, while, on the other, it brings together several artistic methods of the 20th century. Merging experiences of decomposing movement in early photography with automatic writing or action painting, the work becomes an art historical commentary and a poetical reconciliation of the static and moving images.

MC