La Madeleine

1964 / 2004

16.3 x 18.8 x 16.5 cm

Collage, Bakelite, brass, motor

La Madeleine is composed of cut-ups of monochrome, coloured, old and new postcards of the church La Madeleine in Paris, all glued onto a motorised cylinder. Here for the first time since the Vibrograph, was a graphic, rather than textual, image fixed onto a drum like Lijn’s Poem Machines. As they whirled, the repeated and shuffled Corinthian columns of the temple-church became abstract staves of light and power.

Lijn is an artist who attends to the past and to memory and the place name evokes a Proustian memory – that of the instrument which opens the vistas of involuntary memory, a persistent image, just as the whirling units of classical culture re-combined into a new but also primordial spectacle.” (David Alan Mellor, 2005)

Photographs by Richard Wilding 2014