calendario eventi  :: 

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14/4/2008

Three exhibitions

Jeu de Paume, Paris

Alec Soth: the Space Between Us

Alec Soth's photographs are rooted in the tradition of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore. His representation of everyday life conveys the American ideals of independence, freedom, spirituality and individualism.

The exhibition features 71 photographs: a selection from Alec Soth’s two acclaimed bodies of work, Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004) and Niagara (2006) will be presented along with a selection of images from the series Dog Days, Bogotá (2007), Paris Minnesota (2007) and his ongoing project, Portraits.

Since his inclusion in the prestigious Whitney Biennial and the publication of Sleeping by the Mississippi in 2004, followed by that of Niagara in 2006, Alec Soth has enjoyed an international reputation. An associate member of the Magnum agency since 2006, his work is solidly anchored in the world of contemporary art — not that this prevents him from working on occasional commissions and dealing with the narrower time frames and constraints of assignments, such as the one he did for Fashion Magazine (published by Magnum) in 2006. "L’Espace entre nous" (The Space Between Us) is his first solo exhibition in a French institution and provides an opportunity to discover a body of work that, by virtue of its grounding in everyday American reality, questions two of the essential functions of photography: to inventory the real or transfigure the banal.

Born in 1969 in Minneapolis, where he currently lives and works, Alec Soth originally wanted to be a painter. He became interested in Land Art and this led him to photography as he began to document the works he made in natural settings. Between 1989 and 1991 he studied photography at the Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, with Joel Sternfeld, known for his view camera images recording the ways in which America’s social order is revealed in its landscape. Alec Soth developed a strong interest in American photography of the 1970s and in artists like Robert Adams and Bernd and Hilla Becher, who took part in the ”New Topographics” exhibition at the Rochester International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, in 1975.

That landmark show, which presented a variety of approaches to landscape photography, with an emphasis on man’s mark on the landscape, had a lasting impact on his work. For Alec Soth is in effect engaged in a rereading of the tradition of American landscape photography. The series he makes are always the fruit of long stays in the region concerned, which enable him to become steeped in its atmosphere and thus offer a personal vision. Soth speaks of his work in terms of poetic investigation, and stresses the importance of these journeys guided by ”freedom and lucky coincidences.” His implicit reference is to the road movie. Although shot mainly with a large-format view camera on 20x25 film, his often frontal images are relatively unspectacular. Instead, they combine banal contexts or environments with singular figures or strange details. Landscapes alternate with portraits of his compatriots in their private world. They are familiar figures who nevertheless seem to have sprung from nowhere, as if offering a form of vulnerability to the lens.

The title of the exhibition, ”L’espace entre nous” (The Space Between Us) thus describes this shifting relation between people and the environment in which they try to belong and make their mark. This “space between” is the gap that Soth defines as the space of photography: ”I often say that when I make a portrait, I do not ‘capture’ the other. If the photograph represents something, it’s the space between me and the subject.”

For Niagara, a series made between 2004 and 2005, Soth explored the area around the famous waterfalls and probed the myths attaching to them. Traditionally seen as a metaphor of sexuality, passion and reinvigorated love, they attract thousands of couples as a honeymoon destination. Soth’s photographs are thus fraught with emotional connotations. His photos of the falls are accompanied by portraits — of couples posing in the altogether, of families, of a mother with her baby, a young bride, etc. — as well as photos of motels and love letters. “They lived happily ever after”: as seen by Soth’s lens, this old ideal, though it still appears to guide people’s lives, seems to have faded somewhat, the way a sublime landscape becomes a simple backdrop.

With Sleeping by the Mississippi (1999-2002), Soth worked in a state close to daydreaming on a series of images that, while it never traces a distinct narrative line, captures the spirit that inhabits the banks of the longest river in the United States, cradle of the nation’s identity and history. He shows us landscapes that seem divided between rampant nature and signs of civilisation, portraits from which we can sense the political and economic conditions that constitute the reality of the subjects, and rituals — religious or secular, private or public — that he witnessed all along his journey.

A selection of portraits made between 1999 and 2007 give an idea of an ongoing project. At first glance, these portraits have nothing in common with each other: their subjects range from unknowns to artists like William Eggleston and Boris Mikhailov. Each time Soth manages to convey the personality of his subject, while subtly revealing its sociological underpinnings, thus attaining that fragile equilibrium which characterises his poetic and photographic language, between harsh reality and profound humanity.

In 2003 Alec Soth went out to Colombia with his wife to adopt a little girl. When staying in Bogotá he made a book for the child and set out in search of signs of her history and heritage. In this portrait of the city and its inhabitants, entitled Dog Days, Bogotá, we can make out discreet traces of violence and demarcation: a revolver placed on a table, a wall lined with shards of glass. The series takes its title from the photographs of dogs that are interspersed with the other images: for the photographer, who was psychologically absorbed in the complex process of adoption, the animals were substitutes for the views of street children.

The exhibition ends with images made to illustrate Fashion Magazine between January and March 2007, that being the equivalent of a season for fashion professionals. In response to this commission from Magnum, he chose to mix two apparently antithetical worlds: Parisian haute couture and everyday life in down-home Minnesota.

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Valérie Mréjen: la place de la Concorde

Artist, photographer and writer, Valérie Mréjen uses a variety of mediums to explore the rich potential of language. She uses short, familiar stories from everyday situations that she has read about or experienced to evoke childhood and its memories, the cruel or comical sides of life, commonplaces and misunderstandings. Her approach endows these familiar stories with an obsessive quality, making them strange through the power of the dialogue and the emptiness we can sense behind them.
In her films Mréjen presents everyday situations that are like a sampling of human relations.

Valérie Mréjen has made several videos and two short films and has published three stories: Mon Grand-père (1999) — which she continued in 2000 with the photographs in the series L'Appartement de mon grand-père — L'Agrume (2000) and Eau sauvage (2003), all with Allia. Her film Pork and Milk (52 mins) was made in 2002 when a gallery in Tel Aviv asked her to produce a work about contemporary Israeli society for an exhibition there.

Valérie Mréjen was born in Paris in 1969 and graduated from the École d’Arts in Cergy-Pontoise in 1994. Her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions. Ranging across literature, cinema and video, she explores language and its multiple possibilities, taking as her material modest and familiar events from everyday life. She sketches out a lucid and unforgiving picture of the mechanics of human relations, haunted as these are by misunderstandings and commonplaces.

"La place de la concorde" is Mréjen’s first solo show in an institution. Its title refers both to the location of the Jeu de Paume on the famous Parisian square, and, by antithesis, to the discord and unease that run through many of her pieces. This show features a dozen of her earliest videos along with more recent works and four videos made specially for the occasion, plus an installation entitled Je ne supporte pas, based on the answers given to the question put by the artist: “What are the things you can’t bear?”

On completing her studies, Valérie Mréjen started making her own little illustrated books, which are now available in a single children’s picture book (Une dispute et autres embrouilles, PetitPOL, 2004). She has also published Mon grand-père (1999), followed by L’Agrume (2001) and Eau sauvage (2004), all with Éditions Allia: three autobiographical texts (her grandfather, a former lover and her father being their respective subjects) that use a fragmentary style to convey the music of familiar language.

In parallel, since 1997 she has made more than twenty short videos, of which a selection are presented here. These sketches come out of banal situations, slight incidents and stories that are sometimes cruel and strange. Fixed frames, spare settings, minimal stagings and sequence shots constitute the recurring device. This economy of means helps to lift these sketches out of a sociocultural context and protect meaning and legibility from the commonplace. Rigorously written, inspired by readymade turns of phrase or “found” expressions, the texts are spoken with detachment by actors and thus reveal situations of dissatisfaction, verbal repression and discomfort. The vacuity of the discourses, which are seen as pre-formulated and ineffective verbal glue, endow these works with a tragicomic, absurd dimension.

The videos made for this exhibition continue this logic and at the same time exacerbate the process. Capri thus shows a man and woman having a row and, as if develops, so their names change. Made up of lines from films and TV dramas, the dialogue is simply a sequence of hackneyed lines: “You’re beautiful when you get angry”; “Go on! Say it. Say it. Talk. Talk to me. I need you to talk to me.” There is no natural flow to this sequence of phrases; they seem to be separated by pauses and blanks, as if attesting to a malaise. In Ils respirent, voice-over monologues accompany still-shot portraits of eight individuals, as if providing the material lost in those blanks. They enter a different register, all the way to a silent shot of one of the actresses, Edith Scob.

If Mréjen’s treatment of human relations sometimes makes us laugh or feel uncomfortable, her point of view as an artist is never superior or mocking. For she does not exclude herself from the perturbed condition whose workings she exposes: “All these people… All these bodies, they are breathing. They all have things to do. They live somewhere. All these lives. Each name, each history, all these childhood memories. Faces, lives side by side. Public transport, concerts, offices. All these languages that I do not understand. All these places where I’ll never go.”

As part of the carte blanche offered to Valérie Mréjen at the Jeu de Paume cinema, five of Mréjen’s own films will be shown in the auditorium, including La Défaite du rouge-gorge (2001), Pork and Milk (2004), a documentary in which members of ultra-orthodox Jewish families talk about the consequences of their decision to abandon their religion, and Philippe, shot for the Arte TV series, “Tous Européens”.

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Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain : 25 / 24
Satellite programme. "Terrains de jeux" cycle 3/4

The third show in the Satellite programme is devoted to Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain, a young couple of Brazilian artists who make installations built around a dialogue between text and image, video and drawing.

Born respectively in 1973 and 1974, Detanico and Lain have been working together for about ten years now.
Based in France, these two artists set up a dialogue between language and image via different mediums. Influenced by semiology, their works draw on the world of designer graphics and communication, which they subtly appropriate.
They create new typographic styles by substituting the letters of traditional alphabets with forms taken from daily life. These forms are then staged in exhibition spaces, giving this writing a surprising materiality.

Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain are thus engaged in a meditation on the role of language and its symbolic and physical place in our societies. Language reveals its double function, as both tool of communication and instrument of reading and reflection of different cultures.
In this exhibition conceived for Jeu de Paume, the artists take this research further by looking at one of their favoured themes: the notion of time.
The mechanism of time is analysed, manipulated and related to human actions in an installation which invites spectators to read the world from different geographical and political points of view.

Born respectively in 1973 and 1974, the French-based Brazilian artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain have been working together for about ten years now. Their art sets up a dialogue between language and images in a variety of media. Entitled ”25 / 24”, their exhibition for the Satellite programme continues this exploration by questioning the complex relations between time and space.

Visitors experience the first work in their installation in the entrance area: laid out on the ground, a carpet pattern designed by the artists (a simplified compass rose) defines a new geography. The repetition and proximity of the signs make us lose our bearings and create confusion, sketching out a new order of things. Visitors are thus led to question their own position in space, but also the power relations that guide the world and its geopolitics.

Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain engage here in a meditation on the role of language and its symbolic and physical place in our societies. Language reveals its multiple functions, both as tool of communication and instrument of reading and also as a reflection of different cultures. Influenced by semiology, their works draw on the world of graphic design and communication, the codes of which they subtly appropriate. They create new typographic styles by substituting the letters of traditional alphabets with forms taken from everyday life or the world of science.

In keeping with this spirit, on the mezzanine the artists present a new series of prints made by juxtaposing different time zones. Each of the letters of the alphabet (except j) corresponds to one of the 24 time zones. Expressions such as “midi à Paris” (noon in Paris) are then transcribed into this code, then completed by the application of colours in accordance with the cycle of day and night.

In the foyer a video projection shows a geometrical form which turns out to be a silhouette of the Pentagon. Playing on the graphic qualities of the building, but also on the symbolic meaning attached to it, this work presents an image that is almost hieratic. Patient visitors will discover tiny modifications to the form, which correspond to the modelling of the variations in light. Transformed into a sundial, the Pentagon goes from shadow to light, from omnipresence to almost complete disappearance.

Echoing this work, a double projection presents two different visions of the same landscape, side by side. These scintillating images, which seem to be moving slightly, are not videos but photographs, still images in the process of being retouched by computer. The vibratory quality is due to the fact that all the black pixels have been selected. Detanico and Lain are thus addressing, with great pertinence, the connections between different levels and types of image.

Their meditation on this theme is further enriched by a work presented on the Jeu de Paume website.

Image: Alec Soth

Jeu de Paume
Place de la Concorde 1 - Paris

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