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29/10/2014

Mike Brodie / Matt Wilson

Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris

Mike Brodie
A Period of Juvenile Prosperity

Born in Arizona, Mike Brodie roams the American lands to offer brutal –from time to time shocking but always fascinating- images of those four years of travels, train by train, from one encounter to the next. Covered by masks such as pseudonyms, the amateur makes himself a name as the ‘‘Polaroid Kidd’’, the teeny-tiny child of the small format. Child, cause he was seventeen when he threw himself on the tracks and rails of (a) life, in 2002, with few personal effects and for what was supposed to be just a short journey… One that lasted several days soon followed by a much longer journey he left for with discretion… The modesty of the nickname doesn’t fully express the striking effect those American photographs still have on a photographic scene that lacks new ways of representing a well visited and thoroughly described territory. For his first personal exhibit in France, this photographic Denis Hopper presents a group of photographs published last year in the already sold-out Twin Palms’ A Period of Juvenile Prosperity. Considering the success of his American exhibitions over the past two years, the Filles du Calvaire gallery teamed with the New-Yorker Yossi Milo to pick a substantial amount of those already rare photographs.

It does not imply the Polaroid pictures Mike Brodie started with in 2004, when he found on the backseat of a car an old forgotten camera. This format, that gave him his name, is the one with which he signed the tags he left along his journeys, on walls, following railroad-tracks’ wanderings and encounters. It was in 2006 that he made the standard negatives (35 mm) his own while being confronted with the 46 American states and the 50 000 miles he walked across. In a sort of compulsive road movie, this series follows the steps of ‘’train hoppers’’, youngsters from the American suburbs who took the habit of hacking trains, jumping from one to the other, travelling laid down in wagons or with their noses to the wind, sitting on piles of paper, lulled by the acre sun of the prairies and American steppes.

From those images, one keeps in mind friendly gazes of unknown faces, that soon become dearer to us, of the almost punk-tough, often grunge violence of the American sub-culture, still dusty from the emanations of the air blown by the trains that carry them away. Like voyeurs, we are sitting among this youth, with eyes maybe a little too close, the nose drawn into its sweat and blood, onto those vagabond faces that remind us of the hobos’ poverty during the Great Depression. The poverty of those who used trains as means of communication and transport for economical reasons… Here, we are caught by their untamed wildness, one that bears a sense of complete freedom, of not knowing boundaries, and that seems to be exactly what Mike Brodie translates for us into images.

Valentine Umansky

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Matt Wilson
This Place called Home

Like the travel notebooks of Bruce Chatwin, whose writings offered an incredibly sensitive and humanistic vision of an Australia forever lost, the photographic wanderings of Matt Wilson – another Anglo-Saxon globetrotter –provide ineffable images of the different countries he has traversed. Few in number and extremely unique, these modest photographs take contemporary photography head on. Even framed, they are so small in format, they demand viewers to stop and scrutinize the details, much in the manner of a mini-painting filling a seventeenth century cabinet of curiosity. In that same way, they often seem somewhat damaged, as if corroded by the outdated film the artist uses. The visual result is opalescent: the very visible grain and decadent light outline areas of intimate shadows in nocturnal scenes and offer a smoky, misty rendering in daytime landscapes. This studied technique of the possibilities of antiquated emulsion accompanied with a keen vision represents the core of Matt Wilson’s language. As a result, what you see is tripped and a poetic sway is set in motion. This visual structure gradually informs an incidental narrative that reveals fictional lands on the cusp of a lucid dream.

The scenes captured by Wilson are located outside a precise period in time. Sometimes, they evoke a Brueghelian landscape or a Romantic description, like one from a page of nineteenth century English literature. Other photographs are harsher, hovering beside human fragility and its grimacing facets.

When Wilson first started, he photographed across Europe, first in his native country, England, but after in France, a country with which he has affinity, and then on to Eastern Europe, where he often returned between more exotic stints in Cuba. From his country, Wilson gave us popular portraits. Some, in their mysterious black and whites, are reminiscent of Chris Killip; others, for example the toothless laugh of an old lady, of Richard Billingham. Other, more bucolic scenes are moving: a child lets loose, galloping through the grass, intoxicated with innocence; a young girl perched on a rudimentary swing poses in pensive balance, facing the dimming light of a summer evening. The landscapes resemble fleeting thought, traces of memory Wilson undoubtedly wanted to preserve. They serve as literary citations. The fragrance of a poem by William Wordsworth emanating from a red roofed house nestled in shadowy greenery; the words of L.P. Hartley emerge from an image of a pier in Brighton, blurred by drizzle. And the spirit of Thomas Hardy permeates the shots of a train rolling through the countryside where stands a farm in the washed out light of autumn.

Yet Wilson’s intimist vision is not just picturesque, since it also presents a certain harshness, a severity of life. This viewpoint is perhaps even more lucid when the photographer visits Eastern Europe, which he documents through scenes of faded color, as if time were stymied, decrepit homes along with it, men and women past their prime, cars turning to rust. As the sole survivors of this quasi-palpable sadness, like bearers of hope, children daringly prance on the walls, piss along fences, shoot into a ball, and laugh deeply.

In the Cuban photographs, William Burroughs descends with Wilson into the thick darkness of small streets. Between dream and reality, the artist transports us, almost brutally, down a cutthroat alley gleaming in tones of bronze, introducing us to darkened transvestites kissing in a sensual chiaroscuro evoking Caravaggio. Elsewhere, images of black children boxing are punctuated by the red of their gloves, which pierces the shadows of the dark room. In other shots, the eye attempts to catch up with the passing vision of an old American car, or envies the profile of a handsome Cuban under a streetlamp, waiting for his love behind the wheel of an elegant Cadillac. The atmosphere of these various scenes and their lighting are certain to remind one of 1960s American cinema.

Throughout his travels, bonds form between the photographer and his subjects. His portraits are rich in colorful humanity but also attest to the forgotten. Cuba inspires and fascinates Matt Wilson. Here he gathers together all the elements that nourish his artistic universe. Clearly, Wilson does not so much wish to record reality as it is seen or encountered, but instead to capture an instant he has dreamed of or felt. A kind of photographic infrathin emerges from a minute time and space.

More recently, Wilson chose to focus on his adopted home, the United States. One could have felt some trepidation about the American terrain, a vast space occupied by the ghosts of many great photographers, but once again his work escapes pre-established iconography. Here we find Wilson's wanderings closer to those of Wim Wenders or Jim Jarmusch than those of William Eggleston or Stephen Shore. He draws away from the tenets of New Topography by lending a picturesque, even cinematographic aura to ordinary scenes: decrepit homes, old and abandoned cars, pioneer faces sucking at beers, signs from the old west lying broken in tall grass. His subtle and out of the ordinary rendering of light is white on the Grand Canyon and then impalpable on foliage vibrating with mystery.

The watercolor-like appearance of these images, crafted from the chromatic capacity of the photographic medium, is deceiving. We could call this work pictorial metaphor and even a pictorialist offspring if the characters weren’t so anchored in their times and in their daily lives. While Wilson colors what he sees from a poetic prism, he takes contemporary society into account through subjects that are often hard, sometimes even indigent, although depicted without tragedy or miserabilism. Like John Fante, his interpretation is as raw as it is attentive and kind. And since Wilson has remained English at heart, there is added to this a discreet melancholy and intuition comforted by tragicomic lightness. His work could join the humanist tradition since he captures the popular subjects he encounters through that “decisive moment” that was so dear to Cartier-Bresson. Nevertheless, Wilson’s work is not reportage because it diverts reality in favor of an emotional and esthetic charge that is profoundly moving. This emotion, however, is fueled by numerous reminiscences. They first and foremost belong to the viewer since Matt Wilson’s universe was built by the school of life. Like all great self-taught artists, he has been able to construct an artistic language that belongs to no one else but himself.

Christine Ollier

Image: Mike Brodie From the series A Period of Juvenile Prosperity #5257, 2006-2009

Opening: Thursday, 30th october - 6pm

Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire
17 rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, 75003 Paris
Open from Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6:30pm

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