The Lightning Bug’s Doubt: on Fireflies

Stéfane Perraud’s work Maia (2009) featured a human skull displayed under a light whose intensity was so extreme that spectators had no choice but to avert their eyes, and seek an alternative means of engaging with the work. In Fireflies (2010), Perraud made use of light emitting diodes (LEDs) that created such a low level of light – a light that was barely there at all – that it immediately brought to mind that particular cool light produced by fireflies in their natural setting.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

The 350 LEDs, suspended in transparent plexiglas tubes, invited viewers to come closer and observe the detail of the diffraction of light within the grid of cylinders, or else to locate the point of origin of a burst of light around which there was an uncertainty: was this the beginning or the end of something; was it ON or OFF; did it mean flight or fall; was it referring to the present or the past? Stéfane Perraud’s lightning bugs evoked the fragility of meaning, the same fragility lay in what was on view.

Perraud’s Fireflies did more than hesitate: they swung between two movements, created by the same fixed force, in contrast to many of the artist’s recent works, which evolved over time (Lueurs, Amoebe, and the series Simulte and Maia). In this way, Fireflies was more aligned with Modifié#03-BI2 (2009) in which Jean-François Millet’s painting Des Glaneuses reappeared, transcoded in digital form. Whereas Modifié#03-BI2 created an interplay of distance and proximity, as we attempted to recover the memory of the painting signaled within it, Fireflies evoked a circular movement, which was the only means by which to take in the three-dimensionality of the swarm, and to grasp its dynamic in space.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

The moving eye of the viewer was an indispensable component of the work, given that it alone brought the swarm to life, removing it from petrification. If the viewer froze in front of the lightning bugs, they too became fixed in their strait jacket plexiglass containers. When the viewer moved, their élan gave the bugs flight. Élan, or rather desire, was very much at stake in the work. Fireflies was concerned with the desire to see, the desire to imagine movement emerging in space – a movement that reveals the object – the desire to avoid being snared in a form of despair from which there is no return: that of the immobilized and fossilized lightning bugs.

The low light of the lightning bugs, in contrast to the bright light of death that featured in Maia, evoked two contrasting themes: disappearance¹ and survival². Beyond the political overtones that these terms have, and perhaps beyond the field of the artist’s own interest, Fireflies underlines a trait that appeared in Maia and which speaks of a working method and a position that is typical of this visual artist.

To unpack this, Fireflies was born during Stéfane Perraud’s residency at LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE in February and March of 2010. It began with a series of white on white gouache paintings, in which certain key threads of the work appeared: the swarm, and attempts to create forms of movement that draw the viewer in. The conception of the work manifested and gestated here, in this first phase of inquiry, centered on the artist’s gesture.

crédit photo: Ivan Binet

Parallel to this, the process of creating the work was organized and planned to the minutest detail, before the production phase proper got underway. The work itself is fabricated, or assembled, in a process based essentially on repetition, in the course of which the artist – to use his own words – “no longer thinks or decides.” He has only to reproduce the movements that he himself has set in motion beforehand, and which are conceived in such a way as to inevitably include errors in their fabric that will upset the finely-calculated light of the LEDs in the plexiglass tubes.

The lightning bugs laughed in the face, resisted, troubled and perturbed all attempts at an almost-industrial level of exactitude, bringing with them a sense of imperfection and the fragility of the human hand.

1. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. “L’articolo delle lucciole”. 1975, dans Scritti corsari, 2 p.
2. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2009, Survivance des lucioles. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 144 p.
Eli Commins