There is something in Alexander Schellow’s series of short scenes that compels the gaze to pause and linger one, two, three times at one and the same moment, after which it naturally shifts to the next fragment. Virtually fascinating, this action may last for hours, or maybe even longer. It may be so because these short scenes - “spots”, as Schellow himself dubs them – do not come together into a general narrative, nor are they pieced together into a story by means of montage or a certain type of succession; they do not presuppose any beginning and end, but rather a hypnotic and striking multiplication without beginning or end, yet manifesting an explicit and gaze-fixing rhythm. The potentially endless repetition of the scenes is uniformly measured by the short intermission of a black screen – a dubious pause that not only sets the rhythm in motion, but also allows, i.e. provides space for the scene that has just been seen to be mentally reiterated, to be transformed into a visual memory and thus to practically take place – to be performatively acted out – as that which Schellow’s works represent.

Spanning usually between three and five seconds, these short animations have the potential to bring forth virtually paradigmatic propositions. Probably the most crucial amongst them is that something remembered in human memory never sets in as a still image, but always as a moment – which means it is related to at least a minimum duration, to a “unit” of time, as well as that the memory itself happens in time. Although fully intuitive and natural, this proposition comes into poignant conflict with an enormous theoretical tradition of the relation between image and memory that reflects upon the image – bearer of memory – as a par excellence static image, an image that just points and says “it was”, and sometimes even as a fragment related to the past by virtue of its indexicality. In Schellow’s work, on the contrary, the unit of time, this indivisible whole which envelops a certain memory, bears within itself the idea of change, of dynamics, of multiplicity of images – hence, of their non-coincidence or non-identity. The result of this is related to the outright subversion of the idea of documentality in favor of fiction.

While at first glance the short, animated scenes seem to represent reproduced moments (memories of Schellow’s journeys), the tension they harbor gradually becomes ever more distinct. It is simultaneously a tension of meaning and one produced by the formal qualities of images, as it relates to the collision between the specificity of the scenes, on the one hand, and their abstract and ambiguous nature, on the other. Like old or intensely manipulated photographic images where the specificity of the outlines is simply lost, in the present case of these moments “captured by memory”, the visual information is in perpetual conflict with the noise within the images – as if memory cannot produce a more specific and clear-cut (including visually clear-cut) memory of the thing remembered. Thus, while the skillful mimicry of the documentary form suggests the notion of authenticity – complemented by textual references, accompanying each of the images and indicating the specific time and place they represent – the obscurity of the images, conversely, gives a sense of their increasing abstractness, even universality, in a certain sense, and so progressively deprives them of the specificity they refer to. As a result, we have an aggravating conflict in the movement from pseudo-indexicality towards pseudo-symbolicity.

In brief, Schellow suggests – and in a sense recreates – the inherent contradictions in memory, an act which paradoxically reinforces the impression of striking documentality of the frames. At the same time, however, the most noteworthy thing about these short scenes is not what they display, but the way they were produced, namely by drawing and sequential mounting of the drawn frames. This situation naturally raises the question whether these frames are drawings, documenting actually existing past moments, or whether they are in fact imaginary scenes, conveying memory’s general sense of a particular time and place. It seems to me that Schellow’s underlying statement is that if imagination and fiction could bring about a situation which presents or addresses reality better than reality itself does so, then the question about authenticity is devoid of any significance. In Schellow’s short sequences, “reconstructing life” does not take place with regard to technical reproduction – through the use of photographs or video recordings, serving as “crutches” of memory – but in relation to the hand that makes, creates, produces images. One could say he produces images that imitate memories – if his work has to do with memory at all, then memory is viewed as a creative act, as an act of imagination.

Therefore, the case in point is not about reconstructing the “remnants of the past”, but about imagining and producing reality anew – in a novel way. And this process is related to the careful investigation of reality’s visual properties – the visual matter that makes up the fabric of reality, the very visual field which forms our memories and which our memories recreate in various ways. What is more – if we imagine a visual system with its own rules, directions, hierarchies, centers and peripheries, it is precisely the memories that constitute the field whence emerges the possibility of unexpected short-circuits and visual associations whereby an image seen long ago flashes back, and sometimes explicitly associates with something just noticed. For example, some of Schellow’s wobbling figures crossing a street are strongly reminiscent of the first shootings by the Lumière brothers – an impression most likely related to the fact that Schellow uses an average of about twelve frames, i.e. twelve drawings in black drawing ink per second similar to the first cine-film reels where the frames were usually sixteen. Twelve frames per second, half of what the eye can perceive as natural movement – Schellow’s drawn scenes seem to precede not only the invention of cinema, but also the invention of photography, so as to invent a form which paradoxically restores the independent existence of images within the indivisible sequence itself, within the unit of time and the unit of movement they are an integral part of. Moreover, it is worth noting an important side effect of what is otherwise obvious: the effort in creating these three-second moments requires not just a great deal of time – it further requires exceptional artistic and technical skills. In this sense, Schellow’s work moves away and perhaps comes into direct conflict with an implicit ideal of contemporary art whereby most often the minimum effort should produce the maximum effect.

Against this backdrop, the scene selection seems even more paradoxical – given their triviality, as well as the fact that nothing really significant happens, there is an unusual amount of humor. We could say this is by pure accident, as accidence is suddenly captured and as if immortalized - at least until we realize once again that this accidence was in fact created, artificially produced, and with an incredibly keen sense of atmosphere - so that we may notice but the flicker of the frame, the glimmer of light, the volumes and the overtones, which all emerge from the empty spaces in between the black drawing ink dots.