Amir Yatziv & Guy Slabbinck
Belgium, Israel | 2018 | 52 min
World premiere
Languages : Polish, English
Subtitles : English, French
An almost deserted museum, a guard wearing high heels, a cinephile thief and a Monet painting. These are the ingredients of a mysterious affair appropriated by Guy Slabbinck and Amir Yatziv. In 2000, Beach in Pourville by Monet, exhibited at the National Museum of Poznań, disappeared, replaced by a crude copy. The painting would be found 10 years later in the home of Robert Z., who here personally presents his own version of events for the first time. Using video archives from the police recreating the theft, Slabbinck and Yatziv create other painted images: a canvas on which the two directors play out a reality with multiple facets, between a mischievous copy and a search for the truth. When Pierce Brosnan shows up as an art thief (himself copying Steve McQueen in the original Thomas Crown Affair), and Robert Z. announces that he simply fell in love with the Monet painting, Standby Painter reveals itself as much more than a meticulous recreation, as an adept fool’s game, which boldly questions the relationship that image has with reality—or the greatest enigma in the History of Art.
Céline Guénot