Imprint of Our Encounter
Portraits, Installation, Drawing, Time, Science, Performance, Lines

How to draw double portraits, or how to ”photograph” yourself with your friends.

For my personal show at the Beaux-Arts Gallery in Paris in 1992, I tried out for the first time this installation. An armchair where visitors are invited to have a seat, a table with an electrocardiograph which the Cochin Hospital lent me graciously, and an action that takes consecutively place, with the visitors’ participation.
I pre-registered my own electrocardiograph and put the paper back in the machine. I then took the visitor’s electrocardiograph, printing it over mine, the lines running in parallel and sometimes crossing each other. Part of these two meeting lines is a gift for the visitor, the other is put up on the wall, encounter after encounter.
The work’s title could also be ”Affairs of the Heart”.

I renewed this experience in 1998 at the mediatheque François-Mitterand in Poitiers, in partnership with the Confort Moderne, invited by Dominique Truco.

I selected some of these ”imprints”, and they became, scanned, digitally treated and printed, an original edition.

In 1989 I worked for the first time with eletrocardiograms, in the Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière Chapel in Paris. On the interiour walls of the chapel, at 1.50 m from the ground, I assembled a nearly 250 m long line of electrocardiograms from patients of the Hospital Pitiés-Salpêtrière, offered by the cardiological service.

Jason Karaïndros

Often determinating, sometimes deceiving, long-lasting or ephemeral, desired or furtuous, encounters with others are omnipresent in the centre of our lives.
This work can’t exist if each of us doesn’t wish for it. The artist invites us to go to meet our heartbeat, slow or fast, regular or racing. We lend our individual pulse to the electrocardiograph and thus write, in a duo with the artist, the brief interiour story of our encounter. When written on the thermosensitive paper, this superposed double heartbeat will be divided in two parts, one fragment of the encounter is given to each participant, the other kept by the artist and exposed as part of the line of an abstract poem.

Dominique Truco