Spotlight: Philippe Parreno

Spotlight is a weekly presentation focusing on an artwork or a group of works. This week in the spotlight is Philippe Parreno’s lightboxes Invisibleboy.

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Invisibleboy, 2020 consists of seven light boxes, all featuring a still taken from Philippe Parreno's film Invisibleboy", 2010–2015, that has been enlarged and printed on a Duratrans transparency, mounted in a light box.⁠

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Invisibleboy portrays the world of a Chinese child immigrant in New York's Chinatown. The narrow streets and cramped spaces in which the local community lives are populated by monstrous imaginary figures. In Invisibleboy, reality and fiction overlap: monsters creep into the images of the urban fabric and city life, taking on alien forms. Scratched directly into the film stock, these monsters spring to life out of its frames. Parreno tries to give an image to people generally described as "invisible," who fall outside of any legal framework.⁠

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For this new series of light boxes, the artist has delicately scratched the transparencies to add texture and presence to the existing monstrous figures of the film. Each image features a different creature, named by the artist: in this case, The Hanger.⁠

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The work is unique in a series of five variations. Every variation is customized by the artist with unique hand-scratches.⁠