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Across the grid
Vanina Pinter
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Frédéric Teschner's polyptych is a mineral constellation, evidencing the fragility of sight, memory and graphic design. By displaying Le Havre windbreak in a prominent semiotic position across a series of five posters, Teschner succeeded in representing and amplifying the idea of monumentality and decay. Confronting the sea, the screen-wall used to shelter men and boats. Today, it is a concrete growth; a testimony to a bygone harbor.
H A V R E stands as the “grayest” work of the graphic designer. Conspicuously gray. Teschner's gray is a matter of optics, a mixture of black and white, characteristic of digital constructs, leaking flows of pixelated matter. The series reads like the anatomy of solitude: nothing but linear capitals, echoes of the passage of man, fragments of speech. The spectator stands riveted at the bottom of the building by the low angle shot while the wall's cliff-like expanse sweeps upward in a flow of pixels. The designer started investigating the windbreak in Paris. The quest reflected his nostalgia for a world where graphic design was to change things; a resolve to transcend reality, to find the right weapons and carve his own battleground from the common visual field.
The issue of focal length was no longer relevant because the use of digital tools allowed photographs to be cropped. Indexical images became inexhaustible founts of pixels. You may roam through Teschner's posters and never fully grasp them, never reach the point they hinge on, just as you may roam the planet on Google Earth without your journey ever coming to an end. In the absence of a fixed depth, the eyes can not find a stable focal point; they keep straying and the decision about where to pause becomes a matter of contingency. Reading turns into an erratic process as you realize vision cannot be frozen into one single frame; hence the feeling that “the impression of immensity comes from within our consciousness, and is not necessarily a quality of the object.” In addition, odds and ends from Le Havre, such as buildings, or traces of vernacular typography, are sucked into the picture. Henri-Georges Adam's Le Signal, the power plant towers, ships' names, a detail from a building by architect Auguste Perret drift by. Pixels wear and gangrene our way of looking at the world, which emerges transformed by the breakup of the image into bitmaps. Digital halftoning and completion lead to a new formal and conceptual paradigm, requiring fresh life and fresh codes.
