PARIS.- Absences Répétées opens with the voice of Jeanne Moreau. Carried by a fragile melody, imbued with a sense of romantic urgency, it seems to be addressing François, the film’s protagonist—a novelistic hero glimpsed at first only fleetingly, lying on his bed, bathed in light. Beautiful and young, gentle and somber, he laughs before breaking down in tears. Fired from his monotonous job at a bank—where he now goes only a few days a week to secretly consume heroin—he shuts himself away at home, surrendering to despair. “While I am alone in my room, outside life goes on,” he says.

Moreau’s voice could well be that of François’s girlfriend, unhappy to love a being constantly on the run; or that of his mother, whose desperate visits lead nowhere. Or perhaps it is the voice of his best friend, who has managed to escape this self destructive world, for whom François feels a deep tenderness born of shared memories from a time forever vanished.

Absences Répétées is the fourth feature film by Guy Gilles, a major yet largely overlooked artist whose brief body of work is marked by a singular poetic sensitivity. Resolutely romantic, he was interested in maladjusted young characters, prisoners of their dreams and of the past, searching for a reason to exist.2 Gilles—this “loner of no school”—advocated for a cinema “against all fashions,” a “subjective” cinema in which sincerity and emotion prevail over what is discussed in “highly erudite dissertations” or “dogmatic conferences.”3 Arriving too early or too late, misunderstood by his contemporaries, most of his films went unnoticed and struggled to find funding. Stricken with AIDS, he died in 1996, convinced that one day his work—having found no success during his lifetime—might find it posthumously. He made Absences Répétées in 1972, amid the turmoil of a deep depressive episode and numerous suicide attempts brought on by a painful breakup with Moreau. The voice that introduces the film speaks of François just as much as it speaks of Guy. And it speaks to me as well.

I discovered the filmmaker’s work in my bedroom—a bedroom barely distinguishable from François’s— where I have secluded myself for years, gradually sinking into the depths of silence. Everything external has now become insignificant: in this one-room universe, only I remain.

Loneliness and boredom patiently weave an intimate complicity with the figures that populate my films, my readings, my music.

As this hermetic space where I spend interminable days gradually takes on the appearance of my coffin, I think of Courtney Love’s shrill cry in Miss World, a song in which she prophetically exclaimed, “I’ve made my bed, I’ll lie on it / I’ve made my bed, I’ll die in it”4, a few months before the passing of her partner Kurt Cobain, who was, like me, 27 years old. In his suicide note, as a conclusion, he had quoted lyrics by Neil Young: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”5 Rather than accepting inevitable aging, perhaps one should let oneself be carried away by the morbid and comforting suicidal dream. If life goes on like this—waiting, waiting again, waiting eternally—then one should act and seek. As Jacques Rigaut wrote, “suicide must be a vocation.”6

Music traces the path, poetry extends it; the verses of Xavier Villaurrutia often return to my mind: “La muerte toma siempre la forma de la alcoba que nos contiene”7 The Mexican poet—alienated and scorned—constructed for himself an “artificial refuge,” “a private world populated by the ghosts of eroticism, sleep, and death. A world governed by the word absence.”8 It is this space of introspection that, both in his life and in his poems, shelters his thoughts. His “solitary poetry for solitaries”9 is the result of the inner journey of a motionless pilgrim who, from an arid and obscure room, devotes himself mercilessly to self-exploration. After all, having been violently cast aside by society, all that remains is to give oneself over “entirely to the sweetness of conversing with (our) soul, since it is the only one that men cannot take from (us)”10, as Rousseau once wrote when, at the end of his life, he too had become a pariah. This is what François commits himself to: devoting his reclusive life to writing a collection of brief reflections, aphorisms, unpretentious meditations—just a few sentences, a few words—from a being who has become insignificant and believes himself to be nothing more than his own shadow.

His confessional tool is the pen; Guy Gilles’s is the camera, which he uses prodigiously to summon the sublimated nostalgia of the fleeting instant. In his films, time detaches itself from all linearity: it stretches and diffracts, echoing the thought of Deleuze, for whom “the past does not succeed the present that is no longer; it coexists with the present that it has been.”11 In cinema, time manifests as a fluid experience, made of superimpositions between what is perceived, what is remembered, and what is imagined, thus blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction.

This exhibition takes shape in a similar way. The artists who make it up revisit intimate territories and shift perceptions in order to recompose memory in fragments. Emotions from the past reappear as transfigured murmurs, awakening sensations that arise despite oneself, letting the past vibrate in the present. They develop a singular artistic gesture, on the edge of poetry, which seeks less to narrate than to awaken sensitivity, outside all orthodoxy.

Le lent demain thus appears as a suspended space between personal diary and mise en scène, a mnemonic construction in which memory is not a simple passive reservoir of the past, but an active process of narrating one’s own life. As Paul Ricoeur emphasizes, the self comes to be understood by assembling its memories into a story.12 This story is presented here, in the gallery, as a reconstructed bedroom that is mine without quite being so. It goes beyond the faithful autobiographical restitution to open itself to distance, transposition, and reinvention, because, to borrow Guy Gilles’s words, “in all true artistic creation, there is always the search for what one is, what one could be, and what one would like to be.” 13

Like the filmmaker, they all adopt a sensitive rather than demonstrative stance—a way of looking at the world askew. For them, creation is inseparable from life: it follows its rhythm and its metamorphoses. Man and artwork nourish one another, until they form an autonomous organism capable of absorbing the surrounding world and reconfiguring it. They don’t invent mirages or create illusions but intensify reality to reveal what is latent within it, and to unfold its possibilities.

The reality they engage with here is that of the domestic sphere. In this bedroom, literary, philosophical, musical, historical, and mythological references overlap, respond to one another, sometimes blur together, shaping evocative compositions laden with reminiscences, where the tangible dissolves into the oneiric. This bedroom is a closed universe, an island where isolation manifests the burden of distance. Geographic and temporal distance first, separating these artists—all Latino and Latin American—from their lands of origin.14 Distance also from the outside world, whose remote echoes, endlessly invoked, feed the paradoxical regret of absence, the aching desire for what remains out of frame. This bedroom is, finally, a territory populated by cherished objects bearing the discreet imprints of solitary, loving, friendly, familial lives that have passed through them. The body, always fleeting, appears only suggested; it inscribes the ephemerality of youth and childhood, reminding us that, whether we laugh or cry, time slips away15, and that death is fast approaching.

Dans notre lit chaud et carré
Comme une nacelle envolée
Tu me recouvres
Tu te découvres
Attentive, moi, je te suis
Où est ta mort, où est ta vie ? 16

Jeanne Moreau’s voice never stops accompanying me. It resonates for a long time hours, days, weeks— after each of my viewings of Absences Répétées. How can one answer her questions? I would like to ask some others in return: where have wonder, tenderness, certainty gone? Life is difficult to envision when our time has vanished. Death, on the contrary, appears to me everywhere. In Isadora Soares Belletti’s funerary bouquet of chrysanthemums, vestiges of a shattering murder. In excerpts from The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq, recited in Alejandro Cesarco’s video while we observe the aging flesh. In Nicolas Aguirre’s X-ray scans, which show us that we are, alas, “walking cemeteries”17 carrying death “as fruit carries its seed.”18 In the diaristic work of Teo Hernandez, whose films are “a journal of solitude, waiting, dream, death.”19 For him, “the only goal a filmmaker, an artist can have is death.”20 Yet it also presents itself as a potential beginning again, a zero point21: “it’s about dying to be reborn.”22

It was Mishima who, perhaps better than anyone else, succeeded in conveying this experience in the preface to Confessions of a Mask: “Writing this work is obviously dying to the being that I am, but I also have the impression, as the writing progresses, of gradually regaining my life. What do I mean by that? That before writing this work, the life I was leading was that of a corpse. At the very moment when, thanks to this confession, my death was accomplished, life surged back within me.”23

From the earliest stages of this project, the face of death has been transformed before my eyes. In constructing it, I may have discovered a way to live with this heavy burden—of experiencing melancholy and withdrawal no longer as impasses, but as ways of reconnecting with the world and with art. While awaiting a slow and uncertain tomorrow, can an exhibition become a cry of hope?

— Sebastián Quevedo Ramírez Paris, January 2026

Here is a properly formatted and standardized version of your footnotes in consistent academic style (Chicago-style notes format, harmonized for clarity and coherence):

1. Jeanne Moreau, Absences Répétées (song). Opening lyrics:
“A bed, wide open and rumpled / Like a stranded boat / Deserted beaches / Lifeless limbs / Disgust for life / Wet eyelids / I listen to your frightened heart.”
Written and performed by Jeanne Moreau. Available on YouTube.

2. Gaël Lépingle has played a major role in the rediscovery of Guy Gilles’s work, notably by directing the docu-fiction film Guy Gilles (2008), as well as the book Guy Gilles: un cinéaste au fil du temps (2014). In academic circles, Mélanie Forret has extensively written about Gilles as part of her doctoral thesis, later published as Guy Gilles: à contretemps (Paris: Éditions de l’Oeil, 2022). In 2022, the conference “Je croyais que la vie était un poème” was organized at Université Paris 8. Recording available at: https://www-8etdemi.univ-paris8.fr/je-croyaisque-la-vie-etait-un-poeme/
.

3. Guy Gilles, interview with Henry Chapier, Combat, February 7, 1968.

4. Hole, “Miss World,” 1994.

5. Neil Young, “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” 1979.

6. Jacques Rigaut, Agence générale du suicide (Paris: Éditions Sillage, 2018), 29.

7. Xavier Villaurrutia, “La muerte toma siempre la forma de la alcoba que nos contiene,” in Nostalgie de la mort (Paris: Éditions Corti, 1991), 82.

8. Octavio Paz, “Xavier Villaurrutia en persona y en obra,” in Antología (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980), 17.

9. Octavio Paz, Xavier Villaurrutia: 15 poemas (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1986), 3.

10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Paris: Flammarion, 2012), 41.

11. Gilles Deleuze, L’Image-temps (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1985), 106.
In his documentary La Loterie de la vie (1977), Guy Gilles stated: “What I love about cinema is this often anterior past, this future that is always already past, this compound time—the present of the film, dreamed as more than perfect.” Mélanie Forret notes: “With Guy Gilles, the point is not to return to the past […] but to allow the past to return within the present” (Guy Gilles: à contretemps, 317).

12. Paul Ricoeur’s concept of narrative identity describes how a person constitutes themselves through storytelling, articulating past, present, and anticipated actions to create coherence. Fictional characters—particularly suffering figures—mediate this process, enabling self-recognition through alterity.

13. Guy Gilles, interview in Les Lettres françaises, July 5, 1972. In the catalogue of the 25th Locarno Film Festival (1972), Gilles writes of François: “I tried to translate his turmoil […] The resemblance stops at destruction, which I replace with the artistic construction of the film.”

14. Svetlana Boym describes “diasporic intimacy” as an emotional closeness formed between people sharing a diasporic experience, shaped by memory, nostalgia, and mutual recognition in the in-between space of origin and host country.

15. (If needed, numbering adjustment required — original text skips 15.)

16. Jeanne Moreau, “Absences Répétées,” stanza:
“In our warm, square bed / Like a drifting boat / You cover me / You uncover yourself / Attentive—I follow you / Where is your death, where is your life?”

17. This line appears in Guy Gilles’s documentary Proust, l’art et la douleur (1971) and later in Docile Night (1987).

18. Xavier Villaurrutia, “La poesía,” Revista de Bellas Artes, no. 7 (1966): 17.

19. Andrea Ancira Garcia and Neil Mauricio Andrade, eds., Anatomie de l’image: Notes de Teo Hernández (Mexico City: Ediciones Tumbalacasa, 2019), 88.

20. Ibid., 140.

21. Guy Gilles, interview with Renaud de Dancourt, France Inter, November 4, 1972.

22. Ancira Garcia and Andrade, Anatomie de l’image, 205.

23. Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask (Paris: Gallimard, 2019), 11.