Part one of the double exhibition “The End of the Night”, previously on view at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, was dedicated to the dark cinematographic world of Kenneth Anger. With works by Los Angeles artists Oskar Fischinger, Brian Butler, Karthik Pandian, Stephen G. Rhodes and Jennifer West, the show was saturated with pictorial colors, personal symbolisms and occult references. In return, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions shows part two: an exhibition of works by five French artists prolonging the legacy of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s unfinished film L’Enfer (1963–1964). Experimental cinema, contemporary art and issues of fetishism and mysticism are recurrent preoccupation of the double project’s curator Martha Kirszenbaum. The exhibition at LACE, designed by Marianne Zamecznik according to the purist aesthetic of Clouzot with erudite quotes from op, kinetic and sound art, also presents Julio Le Parc, a French pioneer of sensorial mobile environments and collaborator of Clouzot. Four young artists reload this canonical, theatrical expressivity and particular eroticism in Pulse (2010-2012), a minimal light but high noise generating sculpture by Pierre-Laurent Cassière; The Eighth Sphere (2010), a geometrical double-channel projection by Florian and Michael Quistrebert; and two formal video essays on objects by Isabelle Cornaro, with the specific self-reflexivity of the post-conceptual approach, reminding us of Roland Barthes’s dictum in Camera Lucida: “A photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.” (Marta Jacu)

“The End of the Night”at LACE, Los Angeles, runs until December 22.