Close up of the door handle.
The camera moves steadily downward, finally resting on a keyhole.
In an instant, the room’s darkness is pulverized by the excess of light.

Open Studios at the Jan van Eyck Academie, July 2021.

"The potential for pareidolia, synchronicity, or analogy in our experience of space is essential to Rudy Guedj’s approach toward narratives. Traces in buildings and memories of places become departure points for nonlinear storylines that, in one way or another, appear to interconnect. By bringing attention to architectural details and glimmering moments of everyday life, his practice explores memory’s fragmented character and the role that fiction can play in its retelling.

In buildings, doors and windows are thresholds between inside and outside, between light and darkness, between observer and observed. Knobs and handles act as shutters between these two architectural apertures. As one of the final architectural details added to a structure, they can take many forms. Though most often unnoticed, a handle can enhance the ideas integral to a building’s design narrative or imbue a space with new meaning as an autonomous ornamental element.

In film, a knob or door handle arouses childhood fears of a bedroom door shut at night. As a cinematic trope, it is an obvious but efficient ploy to create tension and maintain suspense. It taps into the terror of that which cannot be seen but only dreaded. Most of all, it works as a signifier for possible shifts in the narrative arch. It symbolizes a passage in the storyline. Recently, the door handle has also come to bear stigma. It has become frightening and untouchable, its original purpose seemingly defeated.

Turning windows into projecting devices, doors into screens, and handles into the protagonists of a plot, Rudy Guedj created a space in constant transition for this presentation."