From September 24 to November 27, the Collegiate Church of St-Pierre-le-Puellier is hosting the exhibition “Three Photographic Views”, presented by the Capazza gallery and produced by Eric Antoine, Robert Charles Mann and Jérémie Lenoir. Immersive visit!
Culture
An exhibition that goes straight to the heart of the visitor. Bringing him a form of appeasement, serenity and beauty. Beauty, precisely the beating heart of “Three photographic looks”, an unprecedented and furiously seductive collaboration between the Collegiate Church of St-Pierre-le-Puellier and the Capazza gallery embodying contemporary art in all its facets. Laura and Denis Capazza-Durand transpose into the thousand-year-old church the haven of peace of their gallery nestled in the heart of Sologne and adjoining the Château de Nançay. A resonance between contemporary art and heritage, as evidence.
Re-enchant the world. Crafting beauty. Make a smashing statement with poetry. This is – between the lines – the purpose of the exhibition which presents the work of three contemporary artists, Eric Anthony, Robert Charles Mann and Jeremiah Lenoirwhose different styles come to dialogue, to marry. “Our desire was to preserve the success of the architecture of the Collegiate, to let the place breathe while trying to deliver a poetic readingintroduces Denis Capazza-Durand, co-curator of the exhibition with his wife. The world needs poetry! »
An intimate conviction that led the gallery owners to intertwine the photographic work of three artists using totally different techniques and processes, but who each in their own way – starting from the landscape, or from the trace of man in the landscape – transform the real world to anchor it in beauty, poetry. A hurricane of emotions, a great artistic cry. They tell a story where it is a question of remaining human, of resisting at all costs, even in silence, without claiming anything… Enough to tie the throats of the spectators who are amazed in a maze – purified and stripped of all artifice – works of breathtaking beauty and of astonishing sobriety and humility.
On each side of the Collegiate Church, we are as if caught up in the works of the American Robert Charles Mann, based in Chaumont-sur-Loire, launched in a tireless quest to “take time in pictures”. “He only uses pinholes (cameras without lenses) which he installs in California and France for six months, from one solstice to the next.says Denis. He therefore produces a shot that lasts for months, the image building up tirelessly. This idea of capturing long time is conducive to poetry, to gaining height, distance. » From this attempt to transform reality, are born vaporous, poetic photographs where we see the curve of the sun which piles up over the days like a laser beam. Like a reappropriation of chance, an accident, an unforeseen event, art reveals a part of the world that we did not even imagine in a dream. In this paradoxical work, Robert Charles Mann – also a recognized photo shooter who has collaborated with Helmut Newton, Dennis Hopper or Brad Pitt – becomes an alchemist, experimenting with processes with photosensitive paper containing a whole chromatic range.
The three artists who make the exhibition do not denounce the world. They are rather in this posture of saying to themselves: what can the artist do to make the world better? It springs from it as a form of meditation, taking time and distance, a freedom born in constraint.
Jérémie Lenoir takes aerial shots of landscapes transformed by man, industrial wastelands, mining roads along the Rhine… To better bring out an aesthetic, plastic, almost unreal vision. Considered the “landscape anthropologist”, his work – notably his new series Lander – universe bordering on black and white, bordering on lyrical abstraction. And what about this white monochrome work, imagined during confinement, and built layer after layer like sediment on an archaeological site? “There is an aspect of painting in his work”, explains Laure Capazza-Durand. You have to approach, vibrate, feel his canvas to understand how much the artist has experimented both technically and poetically.
In the choir of the Collegiate Church, an intimate space, a veritable alcove, is dedicated to the sensitive and nostalgic work of Eric Antoine, Baudelaire of photography with luminous spleen. The artist works in a view camera and creates his own chemistry, revealing his subject by applying a black background and capturing the light with a particular ink. Intense. Inspiring. His very interior, contemplative universe, as if haunted, evaporated and ghostly, shocks the soul. A chain reaction that pushes us to look back as much as forward. All the contrast of the association of an old process and a photo of today, of classicism and the contemporary. What blur the tracks and play with the gaze of others.
And Denis concludes with a big smile while admiring the works: “What choices of the heart! »
Robert Charles Mann, Eric Antoine and Jérémie Lenoir tell something about the world in which they are. “These are artists who have things to say and have chosen the path of poetry. For us, that makes all the difference! » An art sensitive to the gaze, but not devoid of meaning. A time to meditate, to take the time… to get lost in order to better find yourself.
Consult the exhibition booklet
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