Innerspace - Jean Comandon / David Douard

View of the exhibition "Innerspace – Jean Comandon/David Douard". Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2012. Image: Audrey Corregan

« What inter­ests me in Jean Comandon’s work is the inge­nuity of his filming device and of the imag­i­nary that resides within it. […] His way of dip­ping into micro­scopic research, purely and simply, like a quest for inte­ri­ority, is what links my prac­tice to his. […] With the help of his camera, Comandon per­fo­rates the sur­face and goes beyond it to make vis­ible every­thing there is to see. In my work and in sculp­ture in gen­eral, it is the sur­face of the object and the infor­ma­tion that this sur­face can give us about inte­ri­ority that interest me most.

My pro­posal for this exhi­bi­tion is to create hybrid objects, between sculp­ture and dis­play; to work with emo­tions, prob­lems, sen­sa­tions and with all the irreg­u­lar­i­ties of the body and the mind, and to shed light onto them just as a sci­en­tist would make an atom vis­ible. […] In order to show Comandon’s films in the best pos­sible way, I am starting from the assump­tion that every­thing has con­sis­tency, that every­thing is an organism, and that this very organism, as hybrid as it may be, can be pen­e­trated and explored. One must search deep inside and autho­rise one­self quite a few things, a bit like Joe Dante who, in the film Innerspace (1987), recounts the journey of a minia­turised Dennis Quaid con­tained in a 0.02mm cap­sule through the body of Martin Short. » David Douard

Innerspace is con­ceived in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Paris Diderot University (Thierry Lefebvre, lec­turer and the stu­dents of the Scientific jour­nalism mas­ters course) and the Centre National du Cinéma (Béatrice de Pastre, Collections director).

Left: David Douard, Linked with an element of resignation, 2011, metal, print on aluminium, painted plaster, wood, 168x110x183cm. View of the exhibition at Catherine Bastide gallery, Paris 2011. © David Douard and Catherine Bastide gallery.
Right: Structure for accelerated filmshots by Jean Comandon at the Institut Pasteur (1945). © CNC - Fonds Chevalier.