There’s this self-portrait as an underwater diver emerging through the water’s surface, his masked face surrounded by seaweed and algae, right in front of the lens, his body supposedly coming from beneath the sea like a kind of monster hesitating about its biotope, be it aquatic or terrestrial, unless both (him, Marcel Dinahet, half-man, half-fish), unless just this particular place, on the boundary between worlds, seems to him to be somewhere he can live in, like those plants we call riparian, whose distinctive feature is that they live on shores and banks; they would be incapable of surviving and growing anywhere else. This is a bit what Marcel Dinahet is, a riparian plant, flourishing in the blurred space of the coast, proliferating all the while, armed with this optical arm which he sets down or takes with him, on top of the water, from where he films.

So from the shore he captures the escapades and movements, and the alterations occurring every instant, in this place of instability where everything is endlessly mixed, overlaps, abandons itself and is transformed, is immersed and dissolved, where kingdoms co-exist in their blurred essence. From cape to creek, from estuary to cliff, from high tide to low tide, here everything is re-enacted, whether separated or not, beach and rock, plant and water, sand and seaweed, and even as far as the territories of people standing in the distance. Placed there in this series of borders, juxtaposed and superposed, criss-crossing the undulating line which defines the spot, Marcel Dinahet catches its spirit: not a crazy deity enlivening it, but the atomic manifestations of its matter, provided that by looking for its invisible angles, we end up penetrating beyond ordinary perception. Here the image is filled with water, there with sand and algae. The camera floats along a coast. It moves forward along the beach. This is indeed one of the attributes of art, until something new appears: that of bringing forth, beyond the standardized categories of what exists, the quavering nature of matter, opening up to new dimensions which are like so many new perceptive truths—sand creaking with the noise of footsteps, patient froth on the edge of a rock, slow flame in the sea’s dusk.

I remember some words of Francis Ponge, about his Parti pris des choses (The Nature of Things). He said precisely this: “I suggest that everyone opens up inner trap doors, a journey into the thickness of things, an invasion of qualities, a revolution or a subversion that can be compared with the one made by the cart or the shovel when, for the first time, light is shed on millions of parcels, flakes, roots, worms and little buried beasts.” This is what a Dinahet video often looks like, an involvement with things and an invasion of qualities, when matter, endlessly glowing, moving and mirroring, is ceaselessly being redistributed, when the sunlight itself diffracts into a thousand ovoid and flashing capsules, when the clouds duplicate their movement with the reflection of their shape on water, or else when the source of a river, resurgent and hidden in tall grass, surges forth: thus seeing what the eye fails to see, a space in “pictorializing” motion, which is a possibility of seeing, a pictorial development of the life of

forms in the making. Because I have forgotten to say this: although Marcel Dinahet essentially brandishes a camera, he has the heart of a painter.

Marcel Dinahet started out making sculpture. And then one day, hey presto, without saying anything to anyone, he put his stone sculptures in the trunk of his car, drove to the beach, and decided to drown them in the Channel. He took his blocks of stone and dropped them on to the seabed. Since doing that, he has gone back to look at them and often film them, and over the years they have become accustomed to their new world, lying there in the sand, in ten feet of water. Since that day Marcel Dinahet has not really been a sculptor again. Since that day, he no longer works on matter in the same abrupt way; rather, he lets it in through his camera’s diaphragm. Marcel Dinahet deals with lights, colours and lines, like a painter specializing in seascapes. He is Eugène Boudin in Trouville. He is Krøyer in Skagen. He is Turner on the Thames. They, too, are painters painting shores and coasts. They, too, are painters of the boundary, meaning not what separates and severs, but, on the contrary, what covers and blurs, depending on the style, if mixed with sensation and, in Dinahet’s case, almost even with synaesthesia, when this time the senses themselves are mixed, and a block of sounds, movements and images seems to turn us ourselves into amphibious sensors. And so it is as in a poem by Henri Michaux, when certain images glorify the endlessly visual strength of agitation—with the ceaselessly re-enacted risk of drowning.

There is plenty of water in Dinahet’s videos, and this ubiquitous water is threatening and tries to hog the screen, summoning amorphous ghosts all the while. Like a reminiscence of the great moments of Surrealism, Dinahet probably recalls that there is no such thing as sublime art that gets close to liquid depths. There is no art that does not spawn in the waters of disaster and catastrophe. So it is when, in a prophetic sequence, the island of Sein disappears under the water line. So it is with all these images where, from the water’s smiling surface, we can observe these tired shapes of buildings, submarine bases, man-made harbours, rusting ships, when the camera drifts into the light plashing of water around ruins of concrete and steel, and we do not know if it is there, crouching in the shadow, laughing at time passing and changing something.

We could look at all Marcel Dinahet’s videos as still lifes (of the vanitas variety), something like “Beneath Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine”, wherever lingers the reminder of our finiteness and the pursuit of the wind. So we can spend several long minutes looking at the flame about to go out on the bank, suddenly so like a picture by Georges de la Tour, a mortal look-out casting that calm and compassionate gaze perhaps at the fleeting and deeply hybrid transforming nature of the world.

Because the strangest thing is thus that this still-life soothes us, as if, not content with reminding us of our primary material character, it was already preparing our future dissemination, our mixture, by dint of the fact that the viewpoint itself seems entrusted to matter, to movement, to water, to air, and to the vagaries of gravity, and that we, too, duly settle outside ourselves, precisely where the authority and agency of man, his decisions, and his supremacy, all seem to merge with if not abandon themselves to the victory of things and, thereby, to the humility of the artist, who merely points it out. Where humility is concerned, it can be said that Dinahet holds his own: not only is this where the man’s ethos lies, but it is also a part of his poetics, unless the two are more closely linked—ethos and doing, and the fact that they nurture each other, in accordance with the secret laws of an age-old wisdom, itself acquired in the day-to-day frequentation of this particular space, the sea’s edge, therefore, insofar as it perforce invites us more than anything else. To what, exactly? Not to be too clever by half.

In placing himself there, invariably off-centered, Marcel Dinahet tends to stand firm in relation to the secret and discreet part of the world, whispering and childlike, where we can still hear shells cracking under the weight of feet, where the as it were negative—and in any event elusive—territory is traced, taunting in the felicitous draft all the over-written grammars of terra firma and the dominated earth.

And it is worth repeating that this position is not a posture, that it is only a way of describing the world’s real beat, and reminding us that he is there, beyond all manner of heroism. As such, no authority tries to take power, and above all not the artist. Even his presence, even his body is conceived as a space of random matter, a network of sinewy circumstances, a hazard of matter: a man runs on the beach, clutching a camera, and this produces movements which create endlessly moving frames and forms. In a way, the brief of the artist’s body is no longer to occupy the centre, any more than the sky and the ground itself. And if we were to say it in a philosophical way, then we might say that there is no ontological gap between the person filming and the thing being filmed.

From this viewpoint, Marcel Dinahet is an artist of his day and age, if this is what the very movement of the past two decades is: is it possible to read the merest book of philosophy or anthropology without it seeking to re-negotiate and, if possible, diminish the boundary between man and nature, man and animals, man and plants, man and matter? Like a sort of humanism the other way round, where it would be appropriate to rediscover a humility which has been missing, in our regard, in the past few centuries. Unless this would be rediscovering the very origin of humanism, that which Pico della Mirandola so beautifully illustrated when, in his most famous passage, he attributed to God the following words addressed to man: “I have placed thee at the centre of the world, that from there thou mayest more conveniently look around and see whatsoever is in the world.” Versus all the forms of positivism in the world, some people manage to remember them. And, needless to say, Marcel Dinahet is one of them.