Ange Leccia – Le Baiser, 1985-2024

Since the 1980s, Ange Leccia has used pre-existing materials in his work on the moving image as well his reflections on the object. Through video and sculpture, the artist has developed “arrangements”, by means of processes of superposition and confrontation, in order to obtain “the right point in the relationship between things”. Ange Leccia is an advocate of the practice of “manipulation”, for both objects and images; he strips them of their function for the sake of a poetic questioning of their meaning and the way in which they reflect the society that uses them.

Le Baiser (“The Kiss”) is one of Leccia’s earliest arrangements. It consists of two switched-on film spotlights placed faceto-face on the floor. In a nod to the generic kiss in legendary films such as Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), the artist says the installation is, “a conversation, a human relationship”. The heat and energy of the beams of light are a metaphor for the intensity of two lovers meeting, encapsulating and prolonging a transitory emotional state. Romantic in spite of its industrial nature, the work belongs in the tradition of kisses in sculpture — from Auguste Rodin to Constantin Brancusi — although Leccia subverts the aesthetic codes of that tradition.