CANDIDS
William Leavitt - Alexandra Noel - Ludovic Sauvage - Frances Stark
With book launch for The Joy Lab, William Leavitt, published by Three Dice
Curated by Fiona Vilmer
February 27 - March 21, 2026
Los Angeles is possibly the city that has most actively played with its own image; it is endlessly negotiated, to the point that it possesses a kind of mental glaze characteristic of ethereal images. I like the thought that Los Angeles is initially encountered at a distance, through screens, literally, like a continuous mediated surface of images. Those of television, film, literature, or through the widow of a car. It precedes the experience. It floats like an ambiance, almost synthetic in its persistence, which fiction has ceaselessly ingested. Until the city, in turn, absorbs its own fictions. In LA Politics 1 Giovanni Intra offers this observation: “Everything you read about Los Angeles is true. The city adapts to its own mythology.” The city adjusts to its narrative, shaped by its own projections, its processes of visualization, melancholically inhabited. The city is first and foremost a rumor made of pixels. In reality, it exists in an unreal mode.
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Under the effect of prolonged attention, the image fails to stabilize. The outlines blur opening the image into a space of confusion, affect, or perhaps headaches. The retina begins to hum. Interior, environment, memory, recording. What remains is never the entire image but what it holds. Or rather, what it leaves suspended. Its mental mist.
The distance that seems to emerge functions as a decoy. This exhibition gathers practices whose mechanisms for creating images do not clarify the narrative, but rather slow it down, interrupt it, obstruct it. Each decision and gesture detaches, sometimes anticipates, the image from the continuous flow of a visual culture, often bordering on nausea, in which images can move and drift endlessly. The image is no longer what it appears to be but is negotiated, and can then operate as a critical device. Less to produce a lack, than to open a space in which attention shifts. Continuity gives way, reverberation sets in.
Each image is shaped by the compromises of its economy, carrying the seductions and alienations inherent to its liberal cultural extension that preceded it. Somewhere between perspective and melancholy, delay and uncertainty. Where to position oneself, between adherence and distance? How to produce a sense of vertigo, reach psycho-emotional landscapes without repeating what has already been manufactured in this encounter? Perhaps the scale must be reduced, to a minuscule optical point where desire can persist, even in free-fall or from the sofa. An attention capable of vampirizing the image, not to possess it but to render it defective. Until it slips away, until it invokes, foreshadows, where the gaze understands that it is caught up in what it observes, until it senses its own tinyness.
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Lisa Robertson in Perpectors/Melancholia 2 writes this: “If space were thrown outwards, conically, so that it dissolved in extension, this extension would begin from the point of the eye. That eye would be static. Think of the figures of optical space as leading back to the subject by the shortest possible threads. How big is the subject? Quite tiny.”
She describes distance as a spatial condition in which perspective and melancholia are two independent structures. Perspective, projected outward, organizes the visible, creating an illusion of presumed stability. Perspective is also a construction of space, “a synthesized mechanism of representation of seeing which can detach to become a camera.” The world becomes distant. Melancholia is the affect of becoming aware of this distance.
Melancholia, withdrawn into an introspective, affective space, becomes a speculative field, “a skeptical device, an affective prosthesis.” "Here, a kind of dark background against which what flickers in the images promises nothing, but insists. Maybe, a thirdspace.
Fiona Vilmer, February 2026
1. “LA Politics” in Giovanni Intra Clinic of Phantasms: Writings 1994-2002, Bouncy Castle, Semiotext, 2023, p206
2. Lisa Robertson, “Perspectors/Melancholia” in Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias. Book*Hug Press, 2020, p 47-54.
WORKS LIST
1. Coiled Copper Device, 2017
William Leavitt
Acrylic on canvas 36x45"
Courtesy of Marc Selwyn Fine art.
2. Face Planet, 2025
Alexandra Noel
Oil and enamel on wood panel
Courtesy of Galerie Crèvecoeur
3. no non nom, 2025
Alexandra Noel
Oil and enamel on wood panel
Courtesy of Galerie Crèvecoeur
4. Sprite from shore to shore, 2025
Alexandra Noel
Oil and enamel on wood panel
Courtesy of Galerie Crèvecoeur
5. Dashcam (Green), 2026
Ludovic Sauvage
UV Print, Ink, Mdf, Aluminium
6. Dashcam (Deep Purple), 2026
Ludovic Sauvage
UV Print, Ink, Mdf, Aluminium
7. Cat Videos, 1999–2002
Frances Stark
Video (VHS), transferred to digital, color, sound; 47:33 min. loop
Courtesy Greengrassi, London
Exhibition organized by Inès Kivimäki and curated by Fiona Vilmer