Mark Lewis's work has become increasingly engaged with ideas around movement and stillness, and with the different ways that a work of art can be both experienced in time and in turn can represent time. He is concerned with the ability of film to re-invent the picturesque tradition, a tradition that historically has been constructed, challenged and defined through the painting genres and m or e recently through photography. Lewis' work highlights, through film, that what is always present in a great pictorial work of art is a depiction embedded in a complex relationship to time.

As he states: 'Film could be the continuation and reinvention of the depiction of modern life as articulated by Baudelaire and exemplified in the paintings of Manet. The moment of Manet is an interesting moment indeed. It is, as Thierry De Duve suggests, a moment when art had a choice; to develop the pictorial depiction of everyday life that Baudelaire and Manet proposed, or it could proceed, as it did, in the direction of iconoclasm and the progressive destruction of the depictive mode.' He believes that film's relationship to the experience of time and duration is what initially gave film some continuity with the ambition of painting.

Lewis' work investigates the material effects and possibilities in film, in or der to think through and engage with the relationship between images that try to move (but don't) and ones that try not to (but have to). In The Brass Rail, for instance, the camera is manipulated in such a way that movement in the image can be said to move without any 'real' movement at all, resulting in an acute awareness of time, presentness and duration.

In paintings that depict time and movement such as Vincent Van Gogh's The Olive Trees (1887), shadows were painted in such a way as to suggest that they could not possibly belong to 'their' objects at the time the objects were supposedly depicted. This created a sense of a double time, which is also evident in Manet's A Bar at the Folies Bergere (1881-2)

'To me the failure of film to finally be a picture is also the freedom for it to think through the latter's formal possibilities and limits. The viewer must be absolutely free to remake the work.' It is for this reason that few of Lewis' films include sound, and that they do not require a cinema or screening room for viewing.

www.marklewisstudio.com