Photography Exhibition Jean-Paul Morrel-Armstrong: Tentsugi

For his second solo show, Jean-Paul Morrel-Armstrong has moved on from his more classical stance on photography to a work that starts by tearing up his own photographic prints. Sacrilege, renunciation of the past or a somersault into the future? The act of tearing can refer to psychological references as much as it does to physical, mundane or spiritual ones. It is painful: whilst giving life, it can announce or symbolize death (cf. the tearing of the temple veil on the death of Jesus or the Keriah, where the rending of clothes symbolizes the grief of the mourner in the Jewish tradition). When a muscle is torn, the pain is excruciating; Continually recurrent in psychology, it is healed by words.

TENTSUGI – A Japanese neologism – taking its inspiration from the word Kintsugi; is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold. Here, gold is replaced by the point (ten), which becomes the element that bears light, creates richness and above all, uniqueness. By this means, Jean-Paul Morrel-Armstrong reclaims regular artists’ techniques such as photography, collage and drawing, while delivering his very own unique interpretation of them. As Kintsugi craftsmen repair the flaws, the artist fills the spaces that the tearing has ripped open. There is no dissimulation, which, for a photographer would be the destruction of his work, but rather, the creation of missing matter, in order to give new meaning to the past and to recreate a new story of the photographed subject. In this way, the photography isn’t a freeze-frame of a given moment in time, but more the narration of a story where the artist highlights its (and his own) imperfections.

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