- Entourage? It would be, first of all, just that, no more, a fleeting and wise back and forth between an interior and an exterior decoupled, a permeability. It would be a matter, only for a moment, of having a concern for the world, a concern for what surrounds us, for this troubled ring of impersonal meteorites that surrounds our lives. The concern of the neighborhood and the concern of the transitory. To save for posterity something of this swarming, busy, fleeting multitude. Not to make it exist, of course (it already exists and it knows about it, thank you for it), but to make it plausible, in a way. To track down the raucous accuracy of it. To allow it. To be, only for a moment (the time that the trigger lasts), the author, the inventor of these tiny pantomimes that nothing, except the complicated and uncoordinated nuances of flesh and clothes, distinguishes from the animal and the nothingness. And then what processions... Bread sticks like swords, varied but faithful dogs like lieutenants, beach tools as a standard; the warring passage of life, unceasingly and in spite of itself in parade, because nothing is won in advance, And that again, it is only the background, the story that one tells oneself afterwards. Because afterwards... Then, again, the surroundings. What makes each image remarkable and unique if not its frame and how it constantly crosses its limits? The frame of the window doubles the limits of the photograph. The window delimits the field of intervention of the photographic gaze, like a test pattern or a small theater between the four edges of which anything can (and must) happen. The actors enter in turn by a side, alone or with their family or with the dog. They cross the field, leave by the other edge, at the quadrangular commissures of this mouth thirsty for images. But the look, already, follows them out of the field. They have played a role for a few seconds, most often without their knowledge. Not their own role. These photographs are not at all portraits. Obviously. One cannot make the portrait of somebody without his knowledge and nobody is resembling if he ignores that he is observed. Nobody. Nobody looks like himself and the world, day by day, is fundamentally blurred. Each passer-by is only the extra of a larger production, which exceeds and sublimates him; the unique and subtle flow of a more ambitious and universal portrait difficult to define. The one of the human kind, maybe. But one can only approach the archetype with rigor. This is why the observation protocol is so tight. The photographer settled in the anodyne window of an anodyne shop on an anodyne boulevard. By doing so, she reverses the traditional protocol of the urban gaze: it is the window that observes the stalls of the onlooker, and not the other way around. In the shop window, the equipped eye watches the quiet course of the world. The onlooker often does not notice it. But sometimes a counter-glance unfolds, which offers a contradictory hold to the tenuous surveillance, a little resistance. From then on, the world becomes a little more than this periphery, a little distant, superficial, which offers itself to those who solicit it without emphasis. The world becomes plural and singular at the same time; transient, crossing. Exotic. Maxime Matray, 2002 Exhibition in 2002, LE DOJO, Nice
Copyright Simone Simon