It took twenty years to draw up a first critical assessment of Marc Dinahet’s oeuvre, at one end propped up by the artist’s emergence on the art scene in 1990 or thereabouts, and wound up, at the other end, by a series of exhibitions and the publication dealing with it, in the very early 2010s. The period we shall be discussing here is the one which takes the artist from 2011 to the early months of 2019, with the preparation of a major show being organized by Catherine Elkar, which will fill all the FRAC Bretagne’s rooms. These eight years, which run counter to any artificial and perforce biased period-based pigeonholing, are quite simply those which ensue, and bring us up to the present day. Once this diachronic corpus has been delimited, it will from now on be a matter of defining what, in the course of a short decade, is being pursued, what is being interrupted and, above all else, what is being asserted in a henceforth solidly constructed oeuvre, with the gesture of an artist at the height of his art.
The opening scene: Dinahet dives to the seabed where he places some sculptures which he films in order to make videos, sometimes broadcast on monitors, at others projected. He also puts together an eclectic set of portraits and landscapes which he produces during his many wanderings. Video—and at times, though reluctantly, the photos he extracts from it—is his main if not exclusive way of grasping reality. His medium? Probably, even when, in the background, sculpture and drawing, in ways elsewhere described, keep an eye on making a distinction between this artist’s manner and the expectations of contemporary video. There is not a single portrait or landscape produced by Marcel Dinahet which, near or far, does not have to do with the aquatic element, the sea, lakes, and rivers; and sources. Most of the images made by him rise up from the overlap of two forces, and from the impact they sometimes create: the encounter between water and earth, water and air; and later on, as we shall see, water and fire. So much for the elements, but the interface can also take on the form of borders and, more generally, limits: natural, political, and cultural. All this has already been said, described, and analyzed, so there is no need to dwell any further on it here. On the contrary, these recent years have been marked by a certain number of features, sometimes prolonging and developing his exploration of the visible, and sometimes ushering in new viewpoints, and novel experiences, all designed to set forth the outlines of what must indeed be called a self-portrait, even if it is as clandestine as it is paradoxical. A self-portrait putting the world, and a landscape, to the test.

1.The sea
The ground-breaking gesture which, over and above diving, lies at the root of all Marcel Dinahet’s works is one which stimulates the entire body and which includes both walking and running, one or two arm and head movements, and everything that acts as a base for the way the eye sees things, and presence; in abandonment or in resistance. The way he captures the environment lies at the heart of a performative process of immersion, understood as being well beyond what formerly referred to diving—unlike the head-on position of classical landscape painters. And this takes shape in familiar places, incessantly criss-crossed to exhaustion (the way Georges Perec ‘exhausted’ Parisian places), visited and re-visited: the cliffs of Cape Fréhel, Saint-Malo and Dinard, the banks of the river Rance, the flat expanses of Cherrueix in the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel. And this is included all over the world, where he has been travelling more than ever since 2010: to Beirut, Exeter, Dakar, and, later on, Brazil. And this can also take place in sites to which he was taken by trips and residencies, as in 2011, around France’s most northerly capes, Gris Nez and Blanc Nez. It was there, for the first time, he tells us, that he turned his back on the sea, with his body and eyes turned towards the land. But this head-on stance turned out to be quite different from the already mentioned one taken up by painters, insofar as that sea behind him would nurture the vision offered to him, as captured by his camera. There is an expanse of water rising towards the beach, which gradually covers it, through the simple phenomenon of the tide. And the beach, which here forms the video image, becomes the frame which is little by little filled with water as the sea rises, and it is indeed in this way the screen that is invaded by water and inexorably filled. One thinks of the all-over style that informed the practice of American painters in the 1950s, and the amazing density of Rothko’s pictures, filled in a dizzy-making way. Shortly after that, Marcel Dinahet filmed the island of Sein using the same procedure, his back to the sea, from the dyke encircling the harbour. The camera was fixed on a tripod and it was the sea that provided the motion, that sea rising and progressively erasing the island, in a kind of optical illusion. Illusion? Anticipation would be more accurate, when you know that, with the prospect being introduced by global warming and the resulting rise in sea levels, it is the island of Sein which will be the first to disappear, in Brittany, that is.
With his back to the sea, Marcel Dinahet has been ceaselessly seeking what, on land, acted as an observatory, and a viewpoint over the ocean. And in Sète (2012) it was those little houses lined up along the coast, and in Dinard, those sumptuous early 20th century villas: what we see, and what is looking at us.

2.Ulysses
On Friday 22 March 2013, Marcel Dinahet was in the city of Patras, waiting for favourable winds to take him to Ithaca. In the video Ithaque/Ithaca, we can clearly see that rock which the Homeric legend tells us was the boat which Ulysses, by this magical transformation, wanted to camouflage. Cunning Ulysses. Were they not the pretext for an exhibition, that voyage and that video might well have been a condensed version of the research undertaken by the artist: criss-crossing seas and shores, getting lost in the observation of this land looking at the sea, approaching it head-on (and, unlike Ulysses, without any cunning), attempting nothing in its regard if not filming it. Filming the interfaces of the arrival. Moving forward in the landscape, without inhabitants. Neither Cyclopes, nor sirens, neither Calypso, nor Circe, but Troy also behind him, memories of Ilion and feats of prowess. From the front, nothing to hope for except the patient questioning of the time taken to moor, precisely where the landscape finishes turning itself into an existential experience, the eye’s to-and-fro. There is nobody in Ithaca, paradoxically. Because, previously, on his numerous landings, and in as many landscapes, Marcel Dinahet encountered faces: in Vladivostok, in Ouessant, in Taipei, in Kaliningrad. Faces and bodies in their aquatic closeness, because, the artist says, “when I made them, I was quite sure of one thing, and I still am, which is that people who live on coasts have something of the same state of mind all over the world. Their way of life, the way they approach the sea, the way they move about in such a vast space, are all similar. They are people who travel. For me, in fact, there is the people of the sea. They are one humanity. Whether I go to Japan, or am here beside the water, I feel very at ease with the people who are there and for me this is unlike what most people think, because they are looking for difference. I think that for mountain people it’s a bit the same thing. There’s this link that interested me and this is why I made portraits. And in my opinion, it could be seen in their faces that they belonged to the same throng. It’s difficult to get this across.”2 So over these past few years the faces have turned into rocks and boats. Rocks on the coast, boats to have access to them or escape from them, depending on whether you are travelling, or conquering.
That same year, 2013, Dinahet found himself in Saida, in southern Lebanon, where he filmed the King, a colourful local figure, to whom he told the story of Ulysses, which that descendant of the Phoenicians re-created, in his own way, and in Arabic, looking out to sea. That was one of the last straightforward appearances of a human being in portrait mode, if we make an exception of that 2016 self-portrait, which is as unexpected as it is striking, and which we shall talk about in due course, a new Ulysses rising up from the realm of the seas. Le King can be seen as a counterpart to Ithaque, the loquaciousness of the Bard, transforming into myth the silence of the arid slopes of an island exposed to all the winds of history.
So 2013 was that year haunted by the figure of Ulysses who, without us really realizing as much, opened up an immense space for the Dinahet imagination, a world saturated with boats, all sorts of boats.

3.Ships of conquest and warships

Since his first dives, when he sank what we have to call sculptures, not carved, but for modelling,3 Marcel Dinahet had not produced any artefacts. His whole approach consisted, in fact, in grasping a certain number of phenomena, and the geographical and landscaping context in which they came to pass, and this by means of the camera, in the form of films. In late August 2014, after the death of his wife, Marie, Marcel Dinahet flew to Brazil.4 We shall shortly come back to that visit, when he went looking for Oscar Niemeyer’s buildings, which he had already seen the year before in Lebanon.5 On his return to France, he resumed studio activities, consisting in making boats, first using iron, then wood, scale models, but not miniatures; quite realistic hulls, between 50 cm. and a metre in length (20-40 inches). This liking for boats is not surprising, but actually deciding to build boats probably came to him after a first visit, in 2013, to the warship cemetery at the bottom of the Brest roadstead, at the mouth of the river Aulne, not far from the Benedictine abbey of Landévennec. Those grey monsters that were once part of the old western fleet are biding their time, in the midst of a sumptuous landscape, before being towed somewhere else6 to be decontaminated and then dismantled. The video he made from that subject, Landévennec I,7 can, it seems to us, be regarded not only as one of the artist’s most accomplished and beautiful films, but also as the starting point of a very specific attention he paid to boats, not just as objects, but also as an historical and political vector, and a symbolic entity. Shot from a Zodiac inflatable boat, the film involves lengthy tracking shots along the rusting, stripped hulls, sometimes bearing numbered marks, with, as background noise, the sound of the Zodiac’s engine, like the burst of fire of an automatic weapon, only slowed down and muffled. We may never before have been struck by the pictorial dimension of Dinahet’s work, but we must here observe the power of a process-based and performative form of painting, informal and matierist alike, with the Zodiac acting as the brush. It is nevertheless history painting that is indeed involved here, a kind of painting that is, to be sure, metonymic, but containing a twofold threat, that of violence, and that of ruin. The following year, in 2014, and based on the same cinematographic principles, he filmed the pontoons of Arromanches, those gigantic harbour infrastructures which the Allies towed into place to get ready for the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944. On the one hand, Landévennec, and sculpture; on the other, Arromanches, and architecture, both subjected to pictorial treatment: a state of the world, and an archaeology of its decay. For many years Marcel Dinahet only looked at the sea from the angle of its intrinsic splendor and its no less splendid frictions, with its limits, of land and air. And here we have History rushing in with all the abruptness we are familiar with. The harbingers of this upsurge can be sought in the oldest works he produced in Famagusta (Cyprus), and in Kaliningrad and Kronstadt,8 like so many landscapes subjected to the jolts of history.
During his first stay in South America, a haunting phrase filled the artist’s mourning mind: “burning one’s boats”, that act probably wrongly attributed to Cortes, who allegedly ran his ships aground to make sure that none of his men would shrink before his determination to conquer Mexico.9 In September and October of that same year, 2014, near Cape Fréhel, Dinahet launched a small metal-hulled boat with an interior made of wood, which he set fire to. Over a period corresponding to nightfall, he filmed that flaming vessel, whose deceptive scale, combined with its ratio to the maritime landscape, might suggest that it was real fire consuming a real boat. He would repeat the operation elsewhere, in the bay of La Fresnaye, and then on the river Rance, with wooden boats whose conflagration only ended when the embers reached the water, in a novel interface. Sometimes the scene is filmed horizontally, over the water, and at others—those scenes filmed on the Rance at La Ville-ès-Nonais in particular—it is captured with a high angle shot. By thus varying the procedures of the narrative, the artist organizes the possible positions and viewpoints, both the attitude and the affect of a person faced with a powerful visual experience, a visual sign of an existential emotion. But when he does not see therein a fully conscious act, we, for our part, perceive in that set of highly dramatic videos titled Sur la mer (Brûler ses vaisseaux)10, produced by Marcel Dinahet in the early autumn of 2014, a sort of funeral ritual, a memento mori which only his art could create.
In 2015, Dinahet was in residence in Colombia. During it, he went to Guatavita, a lake in a volcanic crater at an altitude of 10,000 feet in the Colombian Andes. It is there, they say, that the legend of Eldorado partly originated. As a sanctuary for the Chibcha, a pre-Columbian people, it was the theatre of ancient rites into which the tribal chief, the Cacique, covered in gold, dived, abandoning his second skin to the sacred water while those taking part also threw gold and precious objects into the lake. It is hard, here, not to think of the ceremonial feasts known as potlatches, described by Marcel Mauss11, which inspired Georges Bataille to develop his theory of lavish expenditure. It is harder still not to mention Yves Klein and his Zones de sensibilité picturales immatérielles/Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility. The procedure, set up in 1959, consisted in exchanging an immaterial work, completed with a receipt, for a certain weight in gold (doubling with each transaction). The transfer was only effective if the purchaser burnt the receipt and the artist tossed half of the gold into water. If Klein was already burning his boats, or at least half of them, Marcel Dinahet would produce a cheap version of that ritual atmosphere. Drawing inspiration from the Chibcha boat which he discovered at the Museo del Oro in Bogota, he built a rudimentary raft which he then allowed to get lost on the water. With that action, he would wind up the cycle of mourning and Vanity.

In those mid-2010s, and by way of the Suspended spaces collective, Marcel Dinahet spent time at La Colonie, the alternative space founded by Kader Attia near the Gare du Nord, in Paris. There, people talked about anything and everything, and among other things the issue of colonialism. Dinahet has never made politics a primary dimension of his work, but in the navy and its ships he clearly saw one of the main vectors of colonialism, and its topicality in the mastery of sea routes, as so masterfully demonstrated by Allan Sekula. It was in this context of reflection and in the continuation of boat-making in the series Sur la mer (Brûler ses vaisseaux) that Marcel Dinahet produced a set of scale models of cruisers and war-planes which he put in water so as to film them.12 Although the imitation was basic, the effect of reality worked a treat, because you only see what you want to see. Nearly thirty years after his first sunken objects, the artist is apparently reverting to his early passions. I say apparently, because, in fact, everything points to the difference between these war machines and his sculptures made of stabilized sand and cement, dotted with shells. These particular objects in no way resembled anything known, when they play on mimetic illusion. The first were part and parcel of the assertion of a new form of process-based sculpture, while the latter resulted from the image, albeit associated with the same aquatic element, an image which, more than the world of elements, illustrates historical reality. Last of all, the camera alone, in this last instance, sinks down towards a shallow bed, the artist, for his part, having ages ago given up real underwater diving.
It was in the same period that, in tandem with these sunken boats, which are perhaps an immediate consequence, that Marcel Dinahet once again took up a practice that he had shelved since the end of the 1980s: drawing. In this way he filled lots of Canson notebooks with depictions of cruisers and warships grappling with a usually wild sea, drawings with furious hatching, as if hallucinated by a hovering threat, a nightmare.

4.Going Round in Circles

In the early 2000s, in the Loire estuary13 and in the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel,14 Marcel Dinahet filmed while he walked and ran, his camera given free rein at the end of his arm either swinging or looking up the sky. In Paysage frotté (2001), he filmed while revolving on his own axis, until he lost his balance. But, as above-mentioned, it was during two trips, one to Tripoli (Lebanon) and the other to Niterói (Rio de Janeiro),15 both made with the purpose of questioning some of Oscar Niemeyer’s architectural works—a huge unfinished theatre and a museum of modern art—that Dinahet really started to go round in circles, quite literally. In fact, on each one of the roofs and the roof of the museum in Niterói is impressive in terms of its height and sweeping power, the artist is filmed16 either walking or running in a circle. Later on, in 2017, he acquired a high quality camera, with a very fast shutter, and excellent sound recording. Armed with this state-of-the-art equipment, he proceeded to carry out a series of tests.
“It made me imagine spaces where I could compare that image-sound relation with the body of the exhibition visitor. In that particular relation, being faced with a very powerful material factor. Something we don’t suspect in digital technology, in fact. Image/sound gives rise to something, it’s a space in itself. It’s the performance of the capture. You don’t do it with a telephone. With such tools, the further it goes, the larger the space where you can get involved. Either with very cheap or with very sophisticated things”.
It was in 2018, on a trip to Ouessant with the artist Ismaïl Bahri, that he systematically experimented with what he calls his “going round in circles” The tests seemed to him to be more conclusive. This was the start of a cycle which is still going on to this day, where drawing and video are mixed. Before talking about this significant work, let’s go back to the source. Wit is not the least of Marcel Dinahet’s qualities, and if he admits that he thoroughly assumes the fact of going round in circles, he still lays claim to the need to go back to sources. In 2009 he filmed the Bon-Repos sources in Brittany, then, in 2010, the Maubuisson sources in the Val d’Oise. In 2018, he found the source of the Mayenne, which he also filmed. That same year, in Amazonia,18 he filmed a Brazilian water diviner who invited him to try out his divining rod. He gets this gift as a water diviner from his father. And he swears by it. For him, once again, it’s a way of grasping “what is right nearby and can’t be seen”, one of the bases of his work.
By his own admission, “going round in circles” helps him to have access, in his videos, to something more pictorial. If the observation is relevant about the effect produced, all the images thus captured do indeed stem, nevertheless, from photography and video; perhaps even more so from photography in the literal sense of “drawing with light”. This albeit striking method of running in circles and taking photos only represents a part of these captures which involved the complete body. Just as often, in fact, he runs in a straight line. It is hard to describe the images he derives from this. Despite their abstract look, which conjures up the experimental cinema of the 1930s—Hans Richter’s films, for example—, what is involved is exclusively direct capture, without any interventions other than those of the body and its mechanical extension, the camera. Here we see what the eye usually does not see, like what the chronophotography of Marey and Muybridge showed at the beginning of the 20th century. Special effects which are not special effects, real reflections of light, plays of sunlight, in contact with a form of matter of earth and water which transforms them at a speed which only technology can catch and make visible. A visual reality that is as novel as it is unheard-of. In Soleil/Sun (2018), he filmed a puddle of water where the acoustic part is nothing other than the noise of the wind.19 Raw reality, without the slightest sophistication, just what is near at hand and what you do not see. And invariably this liking of sources, here the source of appearances, the one from which flows the inexhaustible phantasmagoria of the world taken bodily.
From now on, when he is not running on beaches, Marcel Dinahet is busy drawing. This is the other aspect of one and the same approach to phenomena, another example of representation. As we have said, drawing appears all of a sudden, and then disappears for a long time during these past thirty years. The drawings he produced in 1988-89 fill pages with these forms which sometimes result from small sculptures, made at the same time, and at times act as sketches. They are certainly a sculptor’s drawings, and they were swiftly replaced by diving. Those which, in 2014-2015 or thereabouts, depict warships are the doing of a man himself at war, waged against the ordeals of life, and against the world’s bad side. They also inspired sculptures of boats and airplanes which he would sink. The one we are dealing with today cannot be dissociated from the latest videos, both in their performative dimension and, consequently, through the total involvement of the body that they presuppose. They can be divided into three categories defined by their format. The smallest measure less than ten centimetres/four inches, the medium-sized ones measure 50 x 50 cm/20 x 20 in., and the largest range from 1-3 metres and more—3-10 feet. What connects them, in addition to a certain visual kinship, and blotches of black gouache on whitepaper, is the extreme rapidity with which they are produced. An impulse, a brisk dash of the hand, with no hindsight and no pentimento. The smallest keep the memory of the hand, down to the mark of the fingers, the extremity of a body at work. Yet it is the largest formats which best express the process and challenges of such an endeavour. The sheet of paper here is on the floor. IT IS the floor. The artist uses it by moving around it in a circular way (going round in circles). On it he puts large dollops of black gouache which his bare feet then trample on, thus alternating the traces of the hand and the marks left by the feet, the first as a painter’s motifs, the second as simple imprints, like those that animals leave behind on the ground. All this doesn’t even take three minutes! And whether they are presented horizontally and flat, or else affixed to a wall, everything about them rustles with the pre-eminence of the body, its incorporation in space, and the fact that it belongs to the world of experience. So, whatever their size, these drawings represent so many actions in space, actions, as Dinahet specifies, “in a given time”. Broadly performative in nature, they attest at once to a space and a time, and another kind of diving.

5.Three Easy Pieces

At the end of this perforce incomplete description of a decade in the work of Marcel Dinahet, we should like to conclude with three originally video works, though one of them is disseminated in the form of a photograph.
In the first, Nuit II, it is night. The camera is placed on a bed of sea shells opposite the harsh beam of a flashing torch. The sound is suggesting a piece of contemporary music of the electro-acoustic variety, coming straight from a computer. But it is a “live” sound, produced by the noise of the wind for which the shells act as an echo chamber. In 2015, Marcel Dinahet realized an old dream. He (finally) bought himself a boat, a dinghy also known as a “marauder” (French, maraudeur). This is the smallest French sailing-boat that can be lived on. The dictionary tells us that a marauder is a thief, or a looter. And it is probably necessary to take that route to wrench from the world something of its substance, something one had not yet seen. And is it really stealing to take what belongs to everybody?
The second work, a still, shows a masked diver whose head (rather than face) alternately appears and disappears on the surface of the water. It is called Face, and was produced in 2016. It shows the artist, as we quickly realize. Does this mean that it is a self-portrait? Given its abundant circulation in the form of a photographic capture, the attributes of his favourite pastime, of that Ouessant landscape20 that he loves more than anything else, we might think so. However, it seems to us to be fairer to suggest that this piece, which is so unusual in Marcel Dinahet’s oeuvre, only represents one half of a diptych which, for its part, might be regarded as nothing less than a self-portrait.
The third work is thus the second part of the diptych we have just mentioned. It is titled Le Nuage/The Cloud, and it was also produced in 2016. It is a static shot of a fragile white cloud gently breaking up in the blue sky. There is nothing more to say.