La Station presents L’ÂGE DU DOUBLE, a personal exhibition of Brice Dellsperger, in parallel with the exhibition FUCKING PERFECT, BODY DOUBLE 36 at Villa Arson and in the scope of the Biennale des Arts, L’odyssée du cinéma, the 100^th anniversary of La Victorine, organized by the city of Nice.

Gathering several films in the Body Double series, as well as work archives (reference movie posters, storyboards, drawings, paintings, photographs), L’âge du double shows the various sides composing the kaleidoscopic universe of this video maker.

Brice Dellsperger’s work concentrates on a review of some cinema moments, in particular of the 70s and 80s: Carrie, Passion, Blow Out, Basic Instinct, Clockwork Orange, … The generic title of the Body Double series is actually a reference to the eponymous film by Brian de Palma released in 1984.

The remake or the cover phenomenon as a genre in itself consists in staging, re-interpreting a story, a text, a scenario, identically. A characteristic example, Psycho by Gus Van Sant (1998) remakes shot by shot the original version directed by Hitchcock in 1960. With Brice Dellsperger, the cover works more like a « forged » copy or a quotation: the artist only respects in part the original work from which he gets his inspiration and thus emancipates from too cinephile of a vision of the exercise.

The artist only takes interest in the most iconic clips of the movies he selects, thus producing short format videos: the shower scene in Carrie, the questioning in Basic Instinct, the orgy in Eyes Wide Shut… A pop repertoire providing the artist with an endless source of clichés and stereotypes.

Body Double 36, he has been directing at Villa Arson for the exhibition Fucking Perfect, takes over the famous aerobic session, exuding lycra and sexual tension, played by Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta in the movie Perfect (1985).

The movies Body Double are systematically made with stand-ins and voice over. Thanks to special effects – consisting, in particular, with embedding and duplicating the actors in a fix set, sometimes disturbing the scale ratio – the cover flips into an assumed artificiality. Only the soundtrack remains sometimes identical to the original one and if so, the actors mime the dialogues trying to comply with the elocution and the rhythm of the speech. This lip-sync principle is a direct echo to the drag-queens’ universe, who, in their shows, outrageously reproduce emblematic pop culture songs.

Except on rare occasions, the clip chosen was replayed by a transvestite actor assuming all the male and female characters. By blurring the line between genres, Brice Dellsperger quotes once again the drag and trans scene but signs mostly an aesthetic position. By repetition and abrupt changes, the acting, performative and split, disturbs the notion of identity in its undividable and consubstantial characteristic.

The notions of genre and sex, here dealt with through the prism of the mirror and repetition, opens onto a field of iconoclast questioning of the popular codes of representation. Through the use of artifice, fragmentation and splitting, Brice Dellsperger shatters the unity of the filmic work so, in fine, he frees himself from cinematographic paradigms.

Pictures of the exhibition