Interview with Gabriel Lester, published in October 2015. at Kontura Art Magazin no. 129.
The artworks by the Dutch multimedia artist Gabriel Lester seem encompassed by a unique parabola, but simultaneously their points spread on two different sides. Gradually, not visibly to the eye, these artworks follow one another within the curve of the variety. In the focus of the parabola, at the very beginning of the artist’s career, there was sound. That primordial tone which by bouncing from the elements of the landscape enabled first people to find their way in the space around… In the early nineties Lester started a career in music and collaborated with various jazz and hip-hop musicians in Amsterdam. He gained valuable experiences, but soon he began to take more interest in physical environment as such and the illusion it can create, and all of this, naturally, has brought him to film and visual arts. One of his first works exhibited while he was a resident at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, was an installation How to act (1999). It was an environment which could be entered, where lights in various colors, sounds and music alternated (just like in the theatre). This artwork doesn’t narrate, but evokes a story without words, and the artist himself calls it a “film in mime”. Terminology would put this work into the category of “audio-visual installation”, but its art form cannot really be determined, it could also be a theatre performance, a film or simply a story … How to act has already determined the direction of this extremely heterogeneous artist, with its two sides dominating the parabola – one is creating the environments without participants or the participants being the shadows themselves (installation Melancholia in Arcadia, 2011, or Where Spirits Dwell, 2014, a sculpture installation produced for the 19th Biennale of Sydney), and the other is recording the very thing which was missing in the environments therein, and that is a human face. Short films made in the recent years, The Inward Gaze Trilogy (three films - The last smoking flight, 2008-2010, The Big One, 2011 and The Blank Stare, 2013), show individuals in the silence of contemplation, as if here the stage where everything happens became the mime of a very face and not the mime of the senses within the environment itself as was the case with the previously mentioned works. The observer identifies with these faces observing him from the screen, and becomes aware that his own face, deep in thoughts, has become a three dimensional part of a film scene, just like his whole body was enfolded by Lester’s spacious installations.
And here it is, while starting the interview with Gabriel Lester, I am immediately blending with the environment where a face will meet a face, I embrace the whole parabola into a unique scene with Lester and me being participants. I see this interview as a conversation between glances, I would almost conduct the interview without words and let the melancholy of curtains of Arcadia crawl through the emptiness of space together with the cigarette smoke, clouds (The last smoking flight, 2008/09, part of Inward gaze trilogy).