Au rythme du paysage

Exhibition in 2023 at the Galerie Eva Vautier, Nice









Views of the exhibition © François Fernandez
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ISLANDE
  • Au rythme du paysage Extracts from the text by Chiara Palermo [...] The image is the result of communication without discourse. In an interview last December, the author revealed the details of her shooting process. It was the encounter with an image that had to emerge from a movement of the camera, a movement that was the fruit of extreme control, necessary to avoid losing the sharpness of the photograph completely, and at the same time unmanageable. This movement was intended to introduce an involuntary element, to force unfinished attempts, to give back to the landscape the mystery that cannot be "represented". The encounter with light became decisive, as did the framing, but they were not enough. The success of photography lies in the miracle of a "gap" between things: the movement of the artist during the photographic shot produces the juxtaposition of several images, giving the landscape its other nature. [...] The photography is dreamlike in character, yet it implies the presence of reality within the creative process, without artifice or illustrative intent, by presenting elements that have their own value as reality and shying away from any suggestive pretence. The artist's desire to present this reality as doubled by the plurality of images that designate it produces situations rather than staged landscapes. The landscape is inhabited by life, although any human community remains absent; the movement of the image in its "own reality" produces life. In this sense, the proposal of something original or raw that is the spectacle and 'double' of these landscapes is not nostalgic or romantic, but proposes an awareness of the constitutive gap between our representations and our values. It is only from this context that the simplicity or poverty of the discourse can be interpreted in their complexity: they are not opposed to our modernity - flight from our world to an elsewhere, nature - in a dialectical dichotomy, but on the contrary they are elements that complexify, open up and disorientate our history: they link the norm of our narratives to the principle of life and to the viewer's gaze on the present, a gaze that will not be transparent. Our story is linked to that of water, and to what it offers that cannot be controlled. The intimacy of the landscape, which appears naked - without human presence or artificial construction - is also charged with the multiplicity of voices that inhabit silence when it becomes 'rhythm' with the hidden movement of the images. Our position can no longer be that of taking a view of reality, but rather that of an "inverted intentionality" in which we are seen rather than seeing: the landscape is watching us, as the analyses of phenomenology have taught us. As spectators, all we have to do is play the game. We have to rediscover a fundamental passivity in which the image suggests these provisional meanings to us: we play and "are played" by the opacity of a History of water that envelops us, in which we can lose ourselves and recognise ourselves, and whose rhythm we must embrace. Chiara Palermo is a lecturer in Philosophy of Art at the Paris Panthéon - Sorbonne University, associate researcher at ACCRA - University of Strasbourg and director of the programme 'Rethinking History from the Body' for the Collège International de Philosophie - Paris.