Since the beginning of the 1990s, Hugues Reip has been developing a prolific body of work that is permeated by an “archa-modernist” imagination. His videos, sculptures, elementary installations and cut-outs form childlike, rock’n’roll dreamlike tableaux. Certain technical and formal processes inherited from the origins of cinema (Georges Méliès, Buster Keaton) and the artistic avant-garde of the 20th century (Fischinger, Kandinsky) mixed with bricolés artifices, give rise to his filmic experiments, often of very short duration.

The term of Greek origin phantasmata has several meanings: an apparition or spectre, a creation of the imagination, a hallucination, or a mental image of a real object. This title, chosen by Hugues Reip for the selection of films (1995-2009) shown in the Crédakino, precisely translates the artist’s world, at once fairy-like and disturbing, which stages another reality, between abstraction and magic, that could be described as relative reality.
“I remember the engravings that accompanied Jules Verne’s stories, which, by making the unreal real, evoked a world that would have a body, a time, a visible space different from ours… but in the same place,” explains Hugues Reip. Hallucinatory visions, games of scale, science fiction: the artist’s Parallel Worlds open their doors.