Espace JB : Bertrand Cavalier : Permanent Concern

Espace JB en Suisse presents the exhibition by Bertrand Cavalier : Permanent Concern.

Permanent Concern consists of a series of smartphone photographs that Cavalier took in the Netherlands in 2021. The objects and situations that he portrays are often recognizable and ordinary: from a plastic table to a brick wall blotched with paint or a girl’s skipping rope. The full zoom used by Cavalier reveals—in much the same way as his presentation of the photographs as monochrome laser prints does—the inherent structure of his subjects and how, as “foreign objects”, they break with the original order. In this way, Cavalier emphasizes the various aspects of urban planning, including among them the unintentional,  “failures”, which he characterizes as a quality that gives room for a subjective and personal use of the cities in which we live.

‘We have a kind of ideal propensity to want to understand the world, rationalize it, build it, make it functional, ultimately leading to emotional and subjective behaviors. I like to use the image of a liquid entity. I perceive us as water evolving within a framework. Sometimes, there are splashes or overflows, and it is these overflows that are interesting.’

Excerpt from a conversation with Claire Contamine, Absys magazine n°7, published by the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles Paris 2023