- Motel
deploys a typical North American urban environment made of nocturnal photos of old fashion advertising neon signs, light frames and billboards for low-budget hosting establishments, motels, pensions and holiday houses' rooms and services, probably all taken in Las Vegas and in the Los Angeles area. The sound video artwork was initially exhibited together with paper printed medium size photos to form a set, unified by the specific concept and complementary visual context it features, combining motels' private interior captions presented throughout the printed photo series, and their exterior and public signs and façades, on which the video focuses. The mono-thematic images display the publicizing multicolour lightnings on the totally dark background of the night sky in which only neon light stars shine. The sequence of emerging and vanishing still images is given at a relatively slow and regular pace, almost as an automated slide show, with a multidirectional sliding effect.

The graphic and cinematographic aesthetics of this nightlife visual environment is tainted with some latent references to the American counter cultural context of the seventies, eighties and nineties. This atmosphere is reinforced by the video's sound dimension. A non-identifiable electric guitar riff is repeated in closed-loop for the whole four minute duration. The rock style melodic phrase recalls the nomadic life-style of musicians, bands, artists and bikers travelling throughout the States and spending their time between roads and highways, motels, coffee-shops, bars and nightclubs.

As often in Daniel Blaufuks' visual poetic universe, some kind of auratic experience of everyday life is re-established and transmitted to the viewers as a «strange weave of space and time in the unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be», according to Walter Benjamin definition of the aura. A certain strangeness fuses with memory and remembrance of recorded personal experiences made by the artist.



KS