Denis Savary
Car Wash, portrait de John M Armleder
Denis Savary, Car Wash, portrait de John M Armleder, video, color, 38’40’’. Sound: compilation of Hawaiian music by John M and Stéphane Armleder. Camera: Margot Sparkes. Editing: Nicolas Ponce. Vegetal Set Design: Stella Falcoz. Acknowledgements: Hélène de Ryckel, Daniel Mudrecki, Car Wash SWISSWASH, Plan-les-Ouates, John M Armleder and Lena Guevry. Produced by Centre d’édition contemporaine, Geneva, 2025
Denis Savary presents two portraits of artists with whom he has been in dialogue for several years, John M Armleder and Giulia Essyad. These two video portraits and two original works resonate with the program of the Centre d’édition contemporaine, where both artists were invited to produce editions: John M Armleder in 1992 and 2024, and Giulia Essyad in 2022 and 2024.
These two portraits depart from the classical approach to the genre, which typically documents and analyzes the artist’s work or personality. Savary instead focuses on recurring and distinctive elements of each artist’s practice – practices that, at first glance, seem to oppose one another: plants for Armleder, and her own body for Essyad.
Savary sees these two productions as a continuation of Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, the video he presented during his 2024 exhibition Quiet Clubbing at the Centre d’édition contemporaine. In both Armleder’s and Essyad’s portraits, we find the recurring theme of confinement within transparent spaces that characterized that earlier video – a kind of return to the past, featuring a light show in the style of a “rural discotheque”, projected onto the walls of his childhood home, turned into a screen. For John M Armleder, Savary creates a botanical garden inside a car interior, which is then driven through a car wash. The transparency and gloss of the windows are heightened by beams of light, water, and foam cascading over the glass, giving the illusion of artificial aquatic plants – all in perfect harmony with the soundtrack of Hawaiian music selected by John M and Stéphane Armleder. In Giulia Essyad’s portrait, the artist’s face appears in the darkness of an indoor laser tag game. The beams of light transform her into an otherworldly being, illuminated by an intense blue reminiscent of the Bluebots – her doubles, small figurines that appear throughout her video works.
Like Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, these new projects explore both the medium and the structure of video itself. Car Wash becomes a kind of psychedelic aquarium, where the image of washing water is projected onto dry plants, evoking splashes – a recurring motif in Armleder’s work. The video Giulia is similarly structured around an effect of projected light: the laser tag environment alternately merges with and reflects off Essyad’s face. The artist, like a ghost trapped inside a television screen, reveals – through transparency – the space she seems to haunt.
