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3/4/2009

Bernard Plossu

Centros de Arte y Naturaleza - CDAN, Huesca

The Centro de Arte y Naturaleza (CDAN) presents an exhibition that takes a look at the landscape of Huesca through the images of French photographer Bernard Plossu. Over a period of two years, Plossu visited different sites in the province of Huesca to create a photographic archive made up of over 300 images that have now become part of the CDAN’s collection.

A catalogue with texts by writer Antonio Ansón, who accompanied Plossu on some of his walks in the sierras of Huesca, will be published in conjunction with the exhibition. Over the course of his career Ansón has investigated the links between photography and literature.

Collaboration between the CDAN and the Huesca School of Arts led to a workshop on landscape photography, conducted by the artist in March 2008. The workshop was held in Bara, the Nocito Valley, in the Sierra and Canyons of Guara Natural Park. Thirty people took part, most of them students, alumni and teachers at art schools in Huesca, and artists from Aragon and other parts of Spain. The first stage was devoted to fieldwork in Guara. The second session, held in October, gave the students an opportunity to show the results of their work. The photographs they produced were viewed by Plossu, CDAN staff, Aragonese photographers Enrique Navarro, Pedro Avellaned and Enrique Carbó, Paloma Castellanos (a curator and historian who studies photography), and writer Antonio Ansón. Along with the exhibition of works by Plossu, visitors will be able to see a selection of photos created by workshop participants. Their work will also be featured in a catalogue.

The CDAN has sought to bring together photography and literature in a publication that gives expression to the way poet Paco Grasa sees the same landscape Plossu has explored. The aim is to take an innovative approach by juxtaposing two artistic disciplines, with the landscape of the Alto Aragon region providing the common backdrop. It is also hoped that the catalogue will help foster a renewed appreciation of the cultural value of this landscape.

From the many possible definitions of landscape we can find, Javier Maderuelo chooses the one which suggests that landscape is “the interpretation of what is seen in the country (territory), when this is looked at from an aesthetic point of view”. País de paisajes (Country of Landscapes), the chronicle of a personal displacement, is the view that Plossu applies in his journeys to Huesca, in which the notion of the variety of landscape begins to be outlined, when a territory is observed and travelled through.

Repeated visits to Huesca over a two-year period, allow an understanding of this work as an archive of landscapes, a notebook of places but above all, in Bernard Plossu’s case, as a series of sensations trapped within a melancholy observation, seeking the essence of things. To follow a map, traverse a territory, recognise a place, look at a stone, go up a mountain, spy on a bird, descend a ravine, no trace left behind, visiting footpaths, walking and constructing a landscape. Plossu feels the natural necessity to move, in order to understand the world. He goes through the territory of Huesca from east to west, loosing himself physically and emotionally through the peculiarities of the landscape of the foothills of the Pyrenees: a single passage between the reliefs of the Ebro’s depressions and the Pyrenees’ Sierras Exteriores. The sierras, as he has called them since his first visit, reveal themselves, creating in the new arrival the feeling of confronting an infinite expanse.

Plossu’s Huesca archive recounts his experience of the journey. The photographer is very conscious that the landscape he’s trying to capture has nothing to do with distances and measures but the practice of walking and looking – with the way in which each element relates to the another, with the observer and with the experience of the place. His landscape is subjective, sometimes nearly invisible, a consequence of the experience of landscape. The Sierras Exteriores represent the external boundary of the large strata of the immeasurable Pyrenees, with canyons from the north to the south, which compartmentalise chalky massifs, cylindrically-shaped reliefs, vertical walls modelled through pounding and eroded into depressions. These sierras constitute a landscape unique in Europe. Plossu places himself at a pivotal point on the map, to observe the central sierra of the province towards the north, lands defined by the mountain chain of the Pyrenees – ever present like a backcloth and towards the south, from the first heights of the Ebro depression, an opening like an exceptional viewpoint over the flat lands.

The journey, undertaken in the first place without a particular aim or objective, became a kind of experimental exploration of the ancient territory of Huesca, which is impressed directly onto the mental map of the photographer, especially there, where the horizon establishes no limits. Going from the large to the small is, according to Plossu, his guiding principle in taking his photographs. In this case the small format chosen for the archive, miniatures of 7x11 cms. and images of 17 x 23, an intimate view of landscape which makes spectators feel that they are the camera lens at the moment of shooting. Faithfulness to format, which characterises his work, rejects enlargement, as too seductive a method. It is known that, as a result of his first visit to Niger in 1975, he abandons colour for black and white and continues to work in this way until the present time, only employing a 50mm. lens. Thus camera and format alike, insulate him from the spectacularity imposed by market forces.

In the work of Plossu unconventional spatial and temporal descriptions proliferate. What stands out in his photographs is the minute description of the pathways he and his friends travel because, unlike other walkers, Plossu doesn’t walk alone. He looks for company, connection with other ways of seeing, like those of Pedro López Esparza; Daniel Zolinsky, David Rodríguez Gimeno, or Antonio Ansón – who showed him the countryside around Huesca and is responsible for guiding us through the voices in the landscape.

The representation of landscape in Plossu’s work is built up through repetition, obsessively sometimes, of the same subject viewed from the same place. The subject, as in the case of the sierras of Huesca, is not sublime, not even picturesque. It could be a chalky mass, which might pass unseen by other eyes, or by the, recurringly envied, privileged point of view of a bird in flight. The landscape he shoots also reveals man, the plots of land, the tunnels, man’s footsteps upon the earth. Plossu discovers archetypal rocks, as well as farmed fields. This posture relies on walking, on its slow rhythms, learned from his father, from experiencing his body displacing feelings, through the territory of Huesca.

At CDAN, through courses and publications, we continue thinking about the idea of landscape. “At present”, writes Javier Maderuelo in the prologue of his book Paisaje y territorio, “we are becoming conscious of the landscape and its values, from the perspectives of different disciplines: creating a landscapist sensibility, which is extending through different strata of society.” We are convinced that art allows us to discover the value of each of these enclaves and each territory and will help us recognise countries as landscapes. Doubtless Plossu’s images help in great measure to read and understand the territory of Huesca as a land of landscapes.

With the collaboration of: French Institute of Zaragoza, French Embassy BARA: Exhibition of work from the photography in the landscape

workshop with B. Plossu
3 – 30 April

With the collaboration of: Huesca School of Arts
Organizes: CDAN. Centro de Arte y Naturaleza. Fundación Beulas

CDAN I Centro de Arte y Naturaleza
Doctor Artero, s/n I Huesca 22004.
OPENING HOURS
Mornings: 11 am to 2 pm; afternoons 5 pm to 8 pm
Sundays and public holidays: 10 am to 2 pm; afternoons 5 pm to 8 pm
Mondays (except public holidays): closed
Free admission

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