Flatland Gallery from Amsterdam presents a solo exhibition by Johan Grimonprez.
It is Grimonprez’s premiere in Los Angeles for his work ‘LOOKiNG fOR ALFREd’. The highly acclaimed 2005 project is a grand homage to the ‘Master of Suspense’ Alfred Hitchcock and demonstrates many reverences to the visual world of Surrealist painter René Magritte.
Grimonprez’s ‘LOOKiNG fOR ALFREd’, 2005, plays with the theme of the double through simulations and reversals. The point of departure is the film director Alfred Hitchcock and his legendary guest appearances in his own films. Innumerable Hitchcock doppelgangers act out a mysterious game of confusion in which Hitchcock meets Hitchcock. This puzzling game of confusion also pays tribute to the pictorial cosmos of the Surrealist painter René Magritte.
Johan Grimonprez conceived the idea of casting Hitchcock look-a-likes in his film ‘LOOKiNG fOR ALFREd’. His added shots of ‘fictitious’ interiors of corridors, staircases, chandeliers and large drawing rooms – filmed in the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels – and music, creates a suitably beguiling and uncanny mise-en-scene. In a slow, dreamlike, almost surreal choreography, the various ‘Hitchcocks’ meet each other, while surrounded by floating bowler hats, umbrellas, crows and a single blond woman. With the help of a mind-boggling crowd of Hitchcock look-alikes, the artist deftly deconstructs conventional notions of reality. Meanwhile the enigmatic Hitchcockian concept of ‘McGuffin’ is being explained to us.
As in ‘D.I.A.L. HISTORY’, Grimonprez’s outstanding 1997 collage of images from the media, ‘LOOKiNG fOR ALFREd’ plays with various levels of reality, with simulations and deceptions. Looking at the film perhaps one doesn’t understand everything, but one does get slowly but surely an uncomfortable feeling of anxiety. Associative shifts elicit a double-take from the viewer, scanning through several layers to reach a visually complex double meaning. This is where he also shows to be in line with Hitchcock, for whom it did not matter what his films were about, as long as they had an emotional impact.
The phenomenon of fear, in the collective sense, is the most important concept in Grimonprez’s work, especially the uncomfortable catastrophic future expectations.
