From top to bottom
:
Philippe Ramette
Contemplation irrationnelle, 2003
AES+F
Le Roi des Aulnes (New-York), 2001-2004
Nina Dick
Still - 2
Eva Frappiccini
Torino - via Perrone
Beate Gütschow
LS #17, 2003
Elisabeth et Carine Krecké
Untitled #23 - Evoking Werner Herzog's Nosferatu
Marek Kvetan
Vidoc 05
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AES+F, Nina Dick, Eva Frapiccini, Beate Gütschow, Elisabeth et Carine Krecké, Marek Kvetan, Philippe Ramette
2 November 2006 - 31 December 2007
Not one of the seven artists selected for the exhibition entitled Mutations ('Transformations') approaches the world head-on. Each treats reality as if simply recording it were no longer of any relevance. How can we interpret this break with the traditional tenets of photography?
It is a transformation that goes far beyond mere aesthetic and formal issues. Digital processing and stylistic devices such as parody or fiction make it possible to challenge the limitations associated with the mere recording of reality, by adopting an approach that is strategic rather than head-on, deliberately constructed rather than purely representational. Breaking with the representational role traditionally assigned to photography and with the established order of dominant imagery, these seven artists invent new ways of seeing and new ways of making statements. As a reaction to the photographer's traditional candour when dealing with a given subject, they produce sophisticated "deceptions" that challenge the way we relate to the world.
German photographer Beate Gütschow's landscapes and cityscapes, for example, are the result of a digital montage using fragments of different photos. […] The figures that have been inserted into the landscape entitled S#7 are seated in the foreground with their backs to us, linking our eye with the horizon in the manner of the romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. What he have here, though, is no longer a romantic fusion of subject and nature, but the artificial, computer-assisted fragmentation and recomposition of an imperfect landscape. […]
The physical involvement of French artist Philippe Ramette in his own work seems to be diametrically opposed to Beate Gütschow's digitally processed pictures. However, the props he uses to achieve spectacular self-representation are another form of artifice, serving as they do to restore something that is missing. […] Ramette's absurd accumulation of carefully staged images reveals, in an amusing and poetic way, a desperate quest for an authentic rapport with the world at large. […]
Whereas Gütschow and Ramette use additional devices to achieve their aims, Slovak artist Marek Kvetán adopts a "subtractive" approach. The series entitled "Vidoc" is made up of pictures taken in different world cities. […] By restricting himself to digitally erasing parts of the image, Marek Kvetán draws attention to the way public spaces are saturated with information.
The outsized photographs produced by the Moscow collective AES+F are a response to large-format advertising posters. By approaching casting agencies, sports clubs and dance schools to recruit its models, the collective has deliberately fallen in line with the aesthetic norms of the fashion industry and the media, where younger and younger models are being used to support brand images. […]
The way the media uses reality is never more clear-cut than when it encroaches on subjectivity, and the strange portraits by Luxemburg-born artists Carine and Élizabeth Krecké are a case in point. They are not the result of photo sessions with real sitters, but are lifted from Hollywood films. The raw material is an existing image that the artists retouch using a digital pen and other image processing techniques. […] The blurred outlines and the fleeting looks on the subjects' faces seems to place them halfway between presence and absence. […]
In "Muri di Piombo" (Walls of Lead), the young Italian artist Eva Frappiccini has tried to relive the bloody history of her homeland by recalling the crimes perpetrated by the Red Brigades in the 1980s. Wherever the project took her, be it to Rome, Turin, Genoa or Milan, she was faced with a wall of embarassed silence. The "wall of lead" goes up as soon as collective history collides with individual fears and taboos. […]
The intriguing series "3min compaction" by Austrian artist Nina Dick involves superimposed layers of information packed onto the surface of the image. Human figures and architectural features overlap across a densely layered surface, to the point where they either disappear or change into palpable 'vibrations'. […] These photographs are like traces of memory built up from intricately layered intermediate images. […]
The seven European artists assembled here show once again that works of art have the esthetic capacity to echo the world's transformations. […] Abandoning traditional approaches to the world at large, they assume the role of investigators (Frapiccini), image saboteurs (Kvetan), publicity agents (AES+F) and illusionists (Ramette). Their infiltration and displacement strategies create new ways of looking at the world and serve to underline its innate relativity. They base their approach on dynamics rather than aesthetics, on process rather than on form, on self-conscious fiction rather than on ideals of photographic truth. These are the paths being taken by transformational artists in a Europe where transformation is the norm.
André Rouillé
(from "Postures et impostures photographiques", in Mutations 1 2006/07 Contemporary European Photography, published by Contrasto, 2006)
Curator: Jean-Luc Monterosso, director of the MEP
Exhibition sponsored by Alcatel, CulturesFrance, Forum Autrichien, and Le Monde 2.
The Alcatel group, principal sponsor of the European Month of Photography, has launched the "Prix Alcatel du Mois de la Photo", a prize awarded by an international jury of photography professionals to one of the seven artists whose work is on show.
Catalogue : A catalogue of the exhibition is available. For further details, see the "Books" section.
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