—- Sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative, and always
eager for a dialogue between subject and photographic experimentation,
the works on show offer a lively panorama of a
certain pictorial trend in photography today. —-
Concerned with questions of form, these artists endeavor to
transform our view of the geometry and the facts of nature,
employing historic, alternative, and hybrid processes. They do
not hesitate to engage with natural elements, create volumes,
or manipulate materials to realize their vision. The materials
and processes inform the work’s intention: this is resolutely
transformative photography, freed from the concerns of objectivity.
The link with reality, so decisive historically in the practice of
photography, is here displaced from the realm of figuration to
the more organic terrain of chemistry, physics, or the work of
the hand. Here, photography attempts to find a narrow path
between the mirror held up to nature and the mirror facing the
author’s subjectivity.
In addition to personal expression, there is undoubtedly a
desire among most of the artists exhibited to see photography
as a relay on a very small scale, of phenomena observed in
nature, which are likely to create images independently of their
authors.
They eloquently carry their research into territories where the
power and inventiveness of their tools and those of natural
laws merge in the evolution of visual languages.
It is here, in the materials that make up nature, the metals, the
light, the sun, that photography seems to be directly employing
natural matter in the service of representation. In this way,
photography develops a highly constructed and varied material
exchange with the world it observes. There is a kind of reverie
about what matter can be, and about the possibilities it offers,
of seeming to see it shape and inform the image itself.
Patrick Bailly-Maître-Grand describes this fascination as follows:
«I am one of those who marvel at the power of tools.»
Is it not a kind of madness to believe in the physical continuity
between the observed world and what photography reproduces
for us? Might the extraordinary illusion of the photographic
image not be produced by the will of the matter that constitutes
it? Is nature ready to serve the meditations of artists,
returning their visions to them like the images we sometimes
find in the heart of stones?
When photography was invented in the 19th century, it was
referred to as a miracle. Its precision, its chemical and physical
reactions, are still questioned today in terms of their power to
fascinate, their ability to bring images to life, in conditions that
sometimes remind us, with renewed acuity, of the small miracle
that is photography.
Laurent Millet & Éric Antoine