The Glimpse of Labyrinthes by XLO
Roy Stuart constructs labryniths.The Glimpse films are complex intricate structures, laden with traps, leading to an “inland empire” at the center of which lies an enigma; images containing secret passages, like a lost door, and it is for the viewer to find the path that connects language and image. The password is not provided. Glimpse 12 plunges the viewer into a universe of games, serious games like life and death games that evoke the relationship between the sexes and the passion often deviating into madness… Between men and women, it has not always been that peaceful. It’s a long saga of power struggles, power play, alienation …where assault, rape and humiliation were always at hand. What are the rules ? How can the sexes manage to get along?
The Glimpse films play with our expectations and prejudices. Voices whisper behind the images, the walls are haunted by the desire and the images are dazzling… And they like to show that violence is not always male violence directed at the passive female – because the woman takes an active part in the war of the sexes. Her formost weapon is the power of denial inflicted on male desire. And that very denial is destined to be a source of excitement … The game in question is similar to war.
The rules are an art form, the weapon, a stare or a glance. A game of epheremal excitement. An appearance, a disappearance A body in full light. Enjoyment … The Glimpse films are the only ones to reveal in real time the unhuried mystical rapture of female pleasure. The game in question is not that of luck. Not even the Russian roulette of unprotected sex. In order to stage these couplings without condoms, there is work to be done. Against taboos. Against the fears. Against prejudice. Against the lies foisted on an entire generation. But it’s not about the thrill of transgression or the bunjee jumping of sex without latex. It is not even the game of winning or losing. Win or lose what exactly ?
![Roy Stuart’s Glimpse 12](https://www.roystuart.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/glimpse_12_01.jpg)
“The time is out of joint”, observes Hamlet. Métaphysics, for which the rules reside in one of the as yet unidentified and fondamental forces of nature, and which perhaps unifies the four other main forces, the one force that makes the connection between the infinitely small and the infinitely large. In the deepest recesses of the cosmos resides that which takes place between two slats of a wooden floorboard in a darkened corridor
where the naked footsteps of a young woman advances quietly-the threat of desire, desire of a threat…. The game is that which articulates the man and the woman in a disarticulated game. Must free men take the game seriously, the game is their only escape in the labyrinth of death. Confronted with the abyssis of metaphysics, religeons create rules which impede the game. They transform sources of joy into places of suffering. It’s thework of free men to activate the rules that make the game possible . As in quantum physics the first game is that of observing. Not that of the voyeur who stays hidden behind the glass and seeks excitation by proxy but the vision of the seeker, active, observing, trying to understand.
Observing the collision of particules. Observing, trying to discover the secret rules. Seeking to find the way out of the game of appearances, in the game of bodies and of beings and their desires. To love is to know, connaitre in French; in which there is the term that designates the femae sexual parts, con, because it is a question of seeing directly what is not so obvious. The physicien Stephen Hawking considers the female an enigma more mysterious and incomprehensible than the mysteries of the cosmos, more mysterious than the black holes.
Is this the woman hidden in the heart of the labyrinth that Roy Stuart explores for our eyes?