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Corinne Mercadier, Lontano: Photographs and Drawings 2000-2017

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Corinne Mercadier’s work is an everlasting flight. Its shapes are on the borders of sculpture, drawing, and dance , spaces are those of painting and perspective of the Renaissance,from the choreographic plateau, and the theatre scene. Photography is the receptacle. It is the heart, the magic moment when the visual recording crystallizes the formal and poetic elements. Without this finalising moment , the body, the staged sculptures, and objects, would remain inert, lifeless. In this work, the poetic meets the photographic to deliver a dreamed image taken in a fleeting eternity. But this immortality is not nostalgic. It always moves around according to new inspirations where pictorial and philosophical references cross each other with shapes thought up by the artist and the movement that she inspires in her models.

This exhibition is an opportunity to experience several corpus that allows one to understand the amplitude of the work, to measure the evolution and permanence of its intention. Without being a retrospective, it offers a plenary vision, all while leaving room for the latest series.

The stage design, specially conceived for the Logis abbatial of the Jumièges Abbey, fits with the sumptuous backdrop of the site that permeates the visitors’ steps, corresponds to the rooms emphasized by the space’s stonework collection. If conceiving a contemporary proposal for the abbey has a risk of dissonance, what was created with Corinne Mercadier’s art is one of  delicate musicality, cadenced by subtle aesthetic resonances. From room to room, the works  dialogue with the sculptures, the path encouraging an echoing of the photographed bodies with that of the stone.

The visions and apparitions that result (from the compositions and the light) go beyond the notions of staged photography or “narrative photography”. With Corinne Mercadier, it is not the story that is inherent to the work, but an inexpressible poetry like a vision, in a visionary or imaginary sense. As if to make better use of reality, the artist put it at a distance, recreated it, re-filmed it so that it became a place of apparitions. Melancholy and mystery are put into play in the celestial space. Here, her references touch on Dürer, Kubrick, Spilliaert, and Poe.

Christine Ollier

Christine Ollier is an exhibition curator and author specialized in photography. She lives and works in Paris.

Corinne Mercadier, Lontano : Photographs and Drawings, 2000-2017
From April 8 through June 18, 2017
Abbaye de Jumièges
24 rue Guillaume le Conquérant
76480 Jumièges
France

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