Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille

Ricard Foundation Prize presentation
in the Centre Pompidou

on Tuesday, October 12, 2010 at 11.30 am.

After their famous series of "ejacs," which jubilantly revived painting by tapping into the repertoire of porn, The Back of the Sign (2007) seems to come from a different planet. This silvery grey canvass, an unidentified object flying somewhere between Ed Ruscha and David Lynch, takes an anonymous photographic reproduction into the domain of painting. The picture in question illustrated newspaper articles on a tragic event, the suicide of a young actress, Peg Entwistle, who jumped to her death from the top of the letter H of the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles on September 16, 1932. The motif is treated in black and white and its aspect and legibility change depending on the position of the spectator and the angle of incidence of light. The work becomes a mirror in which the reminder of a buried past and the present of a reinvented painting reflect each other.

The title, The Back of the Sign, refers to the image itself as well as to the artists' pictorial quest: "We wanted to preserve the aspect of the old image. If there is a lot of light, the painting becomes almost opaque, it gets whiter, and when there is little light, the site may be seen appearing, like a mist moving away and moving in at the same time: you know there is something, there."

Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille, The Back of the Sign ", 2007, Oil on canvas 200 x 300 x 5 cm, from Pietro Sparta Gallery, Chagny, France, Collection of Centre Georges Pompidou, photo: André Morin