Galerie Le Lieu in Lorient, France, is welcoming Bernard Descamps’ exhibition Où sont passés nos rêves? (Whatever happened to our dreams?) Some images were also selected for a book published by Editions Filigranes in 2015.
The title of this exhibition is a question that offers no answer, but lets us follow a thread through a labyrinth that is gradually built by things seen, moments and places trapped or revealed by the photography of Bernard Descamps.
The choice of this title was meant to make a stop over, take a look at work spent in a moment of existence where dreams are no longer taken at face value. It was also to acknowledge and emphasize the “dreamlike” quality of seeing, to establish a character at the same time idealistic and vague through this curious practice of photography, which only captures shadows, moments that would be insignificant without the infinite links we weave between what an image show us and our own memories.
Bernard Descamps made several journeys, but his photography, giving an image of these journeys and meetings, is always a bit focused on the sky, the water, the distance, and the people who live there almost seem to float in a dream space. It is first and foremost the photograph of an inner journey, masterly playing with possibilities of framing and black and white abstraction.
When it comes to characterizing Bernard Descamps’ photography, we could talk about “clear line”. The world there is classified in a shape simple in appearance, but where evidence and mystery balance each other.
This simple photography, close to abstraction, was already the subject of one of his previous series, Sahara, in which light cuts the elegant shapes of dunes and their shadows. It also has his many snow images, whose whiteness makes landscape lines scarce. Its culmination is perhaps a magnificent series taken over the years: images of minimalist figures drawn by the flight of birds.
What space is there more eternally dreamlike than the sky to try and find an answer to the question?
Didier Brousse
Didier Brousse is the director of Galerie Camera Obscura in Paris.
Bernard Descamps, Où sont passés nos rêves?
From May 5 through July 23, 2017
Galerie Le Lieu
Hôtel Gabriel, Aile Est
Enclos du port
56100 Lorient
France
www.galerielelieu.com
