Douglas Gordon works across a wide range of media including film, video, photog­raphy, installation and text. From classic films to nineteenth-century literature, his sources and subjects are diverse but under­lying his work is a constant questioning of the ways in which we give meaning to our experience of the world. He probes the role of collective and individual memory in shaping understanding; for example, in a text installed on the stairwell of the Gallery of Modern Art he attempts to remember everyone he has ever met (List of Names, Random, 1990–ongoing). He is also fasci­nated by the workings of the human mind and especially by schizophrenia. Many of his works explore our tendency to divide the world into opposites: good and evil, light and dark, positive and negative. This idea was conveyed with deceptive simplic­ity and wit in his 1996 video A Divided Self I and II which shows a smooth and a hairy arm wrestling with one another – both arms belong to the artist.

While Gordon’s art takes many forms, he is perhaps best known for his work with film. In one of his most famous pieces, 24 Hour Psycho, 1993, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie is slowed down to a full day’s duration. By detaching the visual impact of the original film from its suspenseful narrative, Gordon creates something new which is if anything more intense and haunting than its source. In Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, Gordon, working with the French artist and film-maker Philippe Parreno, again disrupts our expectations, transforming the relatively ordinary experience of a football match in the Spanish league into a powerful and theat­rical portrait of a celebrated sportsman. Gordon and Parreno positioned seven­teen synchronised film cameras around  the Santiago Bernabéu stadium for the duration of a football match between Real Madrid and Villarreal on 23 April 2005. All the cameras were trained on one player, the legendary Zinédine Zidane. The resulting footage of the match was edited together with excerpts from the Spanish television commentary and made into a cinema film that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2006.

Many people might hesitate at the idea of watching a ninety-two-minute film of a footballer, but this work is as absorbing and exhausting as any thriller. Then the most famous player in the world, Zidane was renowned for his brilliant technique as well as his fiery temperament – in this particular match he was sent off for his part in a scuffle towards the end of the game. For much of the film, Zidane is shown waiting, inactive but fully primed and ready to intervene. As poised as a matador, his physical and men­tal concentration is mesmerising. Close-up shots of his sweat-soaked face, his legs and in particular his mannerism of scraping his boot along the turf, keep the viewer in suspense between the sudden, extremely physical encounters with other players. Sound is an important part of the impact, with bursts of noise from a crowd of over 72,000 spectators interspersed with silence or overlaid with a rousing soundtrack by the Scottish rock band Mogwai. There are also intermittent subtitles which indicate what Zidane is thinking as the game progresses. Gordon and Parreno said that they conceived the work in relation to portraits by Velázquez and Goya as well as the real-time film portraits of Andy Warhol. Combining elegance and violence, this is both a powerful portrait and a compelling study of the human mind and body under extreme pressure.

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, (2015.)