Noise That Stays Noise: Essays

And And: on Laurent Pariente’s White Walls, Musée Bourdelle, Paris, 2006, which can be seen on a number of sites by searching under Laurent Pariente’s name

And And on Laurent Pariente’s White Walls, Musée Bourdelle, Paris, 2006, which can be seen on a number of sites by searching under Laurent Pariente’s name The relation of white to wall: are lightly blinded, we walk up to it, almost invisible in the way that a mirror can render unrecognizable —we walk up to echo into—“When you touch a wall, the wall touches back” (Pariente). The walls in Laurent Pariente’ s work are accretions of intersecting shadows, making us realize that a shadow is the principle upon which all that is impenetrable operates—by situating the shadow on the inside. And the white evaporates. Which is a rising up, and the wall aloft, and the uncanny resistance of chalk. The intricate interlacing of walls that composed his White Walls exhibition at the Musée Bourdelle was in fact achieved by a single wall splitting of f from and turning back on itself, a single line wandering at right angles until it filled the entire room With room after room. It is through the white that the wallas -limit becomes wall-as-unfolding, which is wall-as-wanderer—a series of articulations until it achieves the dimension of a mansion —uncountable rooms and no doors between, and ever y now and then, a corner slit open, a rift from floor to ceiling see ing into other rooms and on to the other therefrom: door way without door after door without an end to the soon and through the door way he saw and the wall opened for him throughout a white afternoon 148 and in one small room you’ll fin a man bending down to pick up something small, a piece of paper, folding over, a white after white we have tried to repeat but a lengthened difference was my home as in shadow; I lived in a series of interlocking rooms that can car ry. And the shadow carried him home. When a door way outnumbers its door, we have an uncountable opening in the shape of the empty , and in glancing to the left, in a series of flight, the angled guest Thus a doorway is always a distance, and if there’s a face in it, our corridors have corridors within them and he traveled seven days without ever leaving the house. Laurent Pariente’s walls are broken and something white follows you from ocean to ocean. Laurent Pariente enters the house alone; the body becomes its own room, and so he must walk on, which is an accumulative art, an intersection of time and space that is the body slightly lost, which is the future until he had no house. If once a white shadow, over, wing, over want under want either and washed it asunder these were the corridors we wandered to pieces gone acre, now naked, what ar my of silent To walk into the deaf house, the chalk house, the flaye house that Pariente has built a house in which there are no rooms; there are only corridors leading to walk into the thought house, the sparrow home, the mathematical hand. We are constrained to live in houses, where star ts anemia, thus amnesia, and are dreaming: the houses of the mind fall for miles. And it’ s relaxing, a matter of slowly giving, and often the fall is lateral, and you walk on without thinking. Laurent Pariente has set out to use silence as a building material , and from there devolve houses composed entirely of angles. 149 If sighted down to the vanishing point, if the earth goes ajar. And she leaned on the doorframe as if she had ages. Which makes the days harder. Which is to say, geometry and light constitute a forest, which is in turn defined by its aleato y, its arbitrar y, its errance is the geometry of a threshold seen across a salt plain delivered at regular inter vals he placed a statue that became a monument because an echo becomes visible the more the forest grows lar ger from your listening, from your leaning in as though you were listening even harder are the days. Space occurs in pieces. Pariente sculpts only what cannot be touched. Interviewer: What do you think touch is? Pariente: White. Interviewer: What do you think white is? Pariente: The face on its way. Interviewer: What do you think a wall is? Pariente: Something...