This is one of the most interesting exhibitions of the Photo Saint Germain Festival.
Eric Antoine met the wet collodion, going back to the heroic times of photography. He works on the traces by appropriating the time, of exposure, of the laboratory, those of contemplation and meditation. With a taste for simplicity, he captures parcels of nature. The body is at the center of his subjects. Body fragmented, frozen, sacred, displaced, it is treated as a symbol. Each image tells a story from which a sense of strangeness escapes. He treats, like a painter, the rendering of materials, all the more evident because he plays with their contrasts. We think pictoriality. He does not hide his interest in Steichen’s work, as he admits his attraction to the radical expression of the new objectivity and a particular passion for Renger-Patzsch: “It’s absurd to love both but my heart swings and I question myself every time I have to accept the flaws of an image “.
Éric Antoine chose an old tool to become a visual artist in contemporary art.
Galerie Berthet Aittouarès shows for the first time his work by presenting forty pictures, ambrotypes and prints.
Born in 1974, Éric Antoine began as a photojournalist and made several trips around the world. In 2010, brutally, he ceased his activity. He isolated himself in his house in the Vosges and decided to learn the old photograph techniques. From now on his photography is black and white alchemy .
“This minutia in transcribing an atmosphere has nothing to do with a form of preciousness: Éric Antoine is not a mannerist but a materialist who seeks as much accuracy in technique as in emotion. ”
Héloïse Conesa
Photography Historian and Curator in charge of contemporary photography at the Bibliothèque nationale de France
Eric Antoine – Photographies
November 7 – December 1, 2018
Berthet-Aittouarès Gallery
14 and 29 rue de seine, 75006, Paris
http://www.photosaintgermain.com/
