"PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE"
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Jeremy Blake's digital animations
Jeremy Blake's abstract videos are more than just animated paintings. His vocabulary of liquid blobs and blurs, pebbly surfaces, and sampled photographs morph one into another to create a never-ending techno fantasyland. Blake's cinematography is interestingly limited: his pictures constantly dissolve and shift focus, but never pan or zoom. The camera stares fixedly ahead, entirely passive, as things slide in and out of its field of vision, encouraging a similarly passive trancelike stare from the viewer.Things happen in Blake's videos; there's a pleasant, mild suspense in wondering what's coming next. As in a kaleidoscope, the process of transformation is more interesting than any one image. The visuals in Blake's work far outstrip the sound. Mostly dark techno-industrial humming like muffled machinery, interspersed with more distinct grinding and cracklings, the sound is so generic and unimportant that the three pieces don't interfere with one another, though they are running simultaneously in the same space.
In a way, Blake's videos do what abstract painting always wanted to, but better. Relieved of the weight of history and the hackneyed romanticism of high art, they are the realization of Kandinsky's dream: stories told in an abstract language of shapes and colors, free to express mystical, spiritual forces and feelings directly, without the mundane literalness of representation.
( Jeremy Blake "Mod Lang" and "Chemical Sundown" 2001 at Feigen Contemporary )
ART HALLUCINATIONS FOR ADAM SANDLER
Baby-talking box-office boffo Adam Sandler is having art hallucinations in his latest film comedy.
In the forthcoming film Punch Drunk Love , which premieres at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 5, Sandler plays a milquetoast phone-sex devotee who falls in love with co-star Emily Watson. To portray those moments of head-over-heels love, director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) turned to art-world digital fave Jeremy Blake, whose color-morphing abstract projections have been seen in New York at Feigen Contemporary, P.S. 1 and the Whitney Museum. Blake’s painted 35mm hallucination sequences represent the Sandler character’s whirl of emotions at key points in the plot. Anderson had seen Blake’s work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Blake said : "This film is amazing. It’s great that Paul, who works so intelligently with narrative, also understands the expressive power of abstraction." Word is that the artist got a fee of about $20,000, and then a bonus of the same amount after Anderson was named "best director" at Cannes. Blake's next art-world appearance is in October at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art .
( Artnet news 09/10/02 )
Blake's works : some animations we can see in "Punch-Drunk love "
( From the Punch-Drunk Love teasers )
Blake's recent works : Many pages full of pictures, infos ( + Quicktime Video of one of the abstract video! )
( Not in Punch-Drunk Love )
Screenshots from the "D&D Matress" part in " Punch-Drunk Love" with a Divx Excerpt of the Paintings in the movie .
From the French Teaser of Punch-Drunk Love
( Digital animations, Quicktime Video )