HONG KONG.- On the occasion of Le French May arts festival,Mur Nomade presents Manon Recordon’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, on view until June 11th. ‘I was walking through the fields, when suddenly a building sprang from the earth’ showcases an installation of photographic and video works bringing life to Impressionist paintings and questioning the perception of landscape in the contemporary context of digital modes of representation.

Using montages and associations of still and moving images, Recordon juxtaposed Impressionist brushstrokes and pixels of video games, and constructed an assemblage of different temporalities. A character makes repeated appearances in the photographs and films of the installation, strolling around the painted nature and the fictional digital landscapes in which the altered perception of time and space makes everything possible.

Recordon conceived her installation as a décor, with photographic fragments of Claude Monet’s Nymphéa as backdrop and on the floor. She invites the visitor to take a walk through the scattered videos and contrasting images, wishing to involve him or her as an actor of History. In today’s context, where nature seen through digital screens has become the daily reality, the exhibition offers a reflection on perception and representation.

In the words of the artist: ‘The notion of landscape and its investigation in geographical, economic, social, aesthetical or ecological terms are necessarily related to the time we are referring to, therefore the visitor will be caught in interstices, in light of the pictorial works, and bathed in the fiction played on the screens.’

Prior to this exhibition, Recordon explored the notion of landscape and revisited Impressionism in works such as the five-minute mute video ‘Initiation d’une poésie thermique (Impressions soleil levant)’ presented in the group exhibition ‘Impressio’ (Atelier Rouart, Paris, 2015) or ‘Alors sur la plaque sensible, tout le paysage s'inscrira’ created for her solo exhibition ‘Partout un rayon frappe à une porte obscure’ (Parc Saint Léger Hors Les Murs, Musée Archéologique de Bibracte, France, 2015).

In Hong Kong, the commission of this new work to Manon Recordon was prompted by the preparation of the exhibition ‘Claude Monet: The Spirit of Place’ by Le French May arts festival at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum. With ‘I was walking through the fields, when suddenly a building sprang from the earth’, Mur Nomade wishes to offer a complementary perspective to the Monet exhibition with a reading of the artistic languages of the past through the eyes of a contemporary artist and their translations into new modes of expressions.

The exhibition is curated by Amandine Hervey.

Born in 1985, Manon Recordon lives and works in Paris. She graduated from the Paris Academy of Fine Arts (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris) in 2009. Previously, she obtained a Master in Cinematographic Studies from Paris VII University, and also studied at the Villa Arson, National School of Fine Arts of Nice.

A former resident of the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici, Recordon is also one of the founders of the artists’ journal M.E.R.C.U.R.E.

Recordon’s interests and artistic practice extend across history, text, film and photography. Her artworks are assemblages and layering of still and moving images, using elements collected from historical archives or archaeological sites, film footages of Impressionist paintings or Ancient Greek sculptures, flashes of collective memory, snippets of news and fragments of modern daily life.