Ange Leccia – Trois Temps, 2024

Since the 1980s, Ange Leccia’s work on the moving image is at the same time a reflection on the object through the use of pre-existing materials. Working with video and sculpture, the artist has developed “arrangements”, through processes of overlay and contrast, in order to obtain “the perfect point in the relationship between things”. Ange Leccia is an advocate of the practice of “manipulation”, for both objects and images; he strips them of their function for the sake of a poetic questioning of their meaning and the way in which they reflect the society that uses them.

Inspired by the heritage of the Grandes Locos, a former SNCF engineering centre and landmark in the history of the railways, Trois Temps is a montage of video images from different timeframes and geographical locations. Projected in these factories that were once devoted to the overhaul of electric locomotives and the maintenance of their component parts, Ange Leccia’s work combines shots taken from train carriages and station platforms all over the world to create a journey between different countries and emotions. His work rejects the narrative format of cinema films, focusing instead on a contemplative mode achieved by repeating images in a loop, with variations in frame rate and light intensity. With its juxtapositions of landscapes and faces, the work evokes notions of transformation and movement, linked to an imagined world of travel and trains.