At the end of the sixties, however, he turned away from painting and started searching for traces of his own past to which he was connected, as he found out, only via a few pictures. And these pictures led Boltanski to question the method he had hitherto used when inventing his pictures. Making progress into the past, on the other hand, supplied him with other pictures in which fiction and the discovery of authentic testimonies blended into each other. The systematic reconstruction of his own childhood and youth using documentary as well as fictive pictures subsequently became his point of departure. In doing so, he utilises a wide range of media such as film, video, performance, and photography, without deducing from this a contradiction to his self-understanding as a painter, which he continues to maintain. The combination of diverse media is also an integral aspect of the spatial installations which have been the focus of his work since the eighties. These also, time and again, create powerful 'pictures', in which Boltanski literally re-draws the past using all types of found objects. He recalls life-stories that have past and are only kept alive in one's memory, regardless whether dealing with his own life or the life of others.
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