After an inauguration as a tribute to beauty, the Galerie Agathe Gaillard is currently showing colours of the French photographer Claude Iverné. This exhibition intertwines mediums and hues, between rhymes and documents. Shown this year at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation where he was also winner of the HCB Award in 2015, as well as at the Aperture Foundation in New York, Claude Iverné, whose work in recent years has largely been in Sudan, pays particular attention to colour, useful, poetic or political.It sometimes introduces an information that the black would not give , or a sudden proximity compared to the real distance, more common for its infinite greys. Just as much as an assumed slowness can be read into it, a silent stripping back to the bare essentials, which can sometimes only be the din itself, a loss of meaning.
He who claims “to take photographs as a human eye sees” without optical distortion, explains his images with the natural attitude of the observer, “I take what comes to me”. Iverné’s photographs are delivered by delayed-action, as in a successive series of shots, but the subtle blurring of the nuances of the chromatic range. The colours don’t shout at us, they are discreet, almost noiseless, they whisper.
So there is as much grey in the colours, than colour in Claude Iverné’s greys. If the black reigns as little as the white, it’s because there is always a glow, even in the depths of the shadows, an illusion in the lack (of light). So many colours, hidden in a muted range to be used by our imaginations, which is an invitation to be curious.
Iverné campaigns against the idea of a stupid public and educational installations. He considers his fellow human beings to be as curious and as intractable as himself. The olive green that characterises the greys inclines towards the sketch, on purpose. It is a question of escaping reality, moving beyond appearances. So it is between the lines, in the nuances, that a space in the viewer’s imagination is opened.
The colour and the black and white are synthesised here in the treatment of the shadows. What do we see? Moving silhouettes open our imaginations, through the absence they try to fill, they are contorted, they dance for the benefit of our feelings. It is a coherent manifesto in the collection of Claude Iverné’s work, A resolutely political position: the images are deceptive. The loudest often prove to be empty and it’s precisely in the hollow, by what they suggest, that Iverné offers to read the world. Movement, gesture, simplified by shadow. The bodies move like Bazelitz, the gaze has to be reversed to imagine the positive, to push the mind beyond the vision.
Claude Iverné, De la couleur
Du 30 novembre 2017 au 4 février 2018
Galerie Agathe Gaillard
3 Rue du Pont Louis-Philippe
75004 Paris
France
