With Silenzio!, Francois Fontaine has built the silent inventory of a cinephile. These hazy photographs of iconic movie scenes exude sweet nostalgia, revealing slowly the intensity of their emotions. They are a tribute to the cinema as well as to photography because Francois Fontaine uses the characteristics of the still image to express his admiration of those images that stream 24 times per second.
Haziness is a typically anti-cinematographic language. Used in photography, it gives the images an aerial texture that relates directly to memory, to a remembrance that is visually inaccurate but emotionally intact. Blurriness also expresses the inability to capture a feeling in a single image, because feeling implies disorder, effervesence, restlessness, shock, and other irrational movements that threaten photographic sharpness. By this language, the photographer includes that which is just outside of a frame, an emotional outfield encompassed in the previous scenes.
The blur is also like a costume that makes impossible the immediate identification of these familiar silhouettes and evokes the different roles that made them charismatic. Being out of focus, these photographs have a painterly appearance which enables Francois Fontaine to show his talent as a colourist and to subtly express his admiration for the lights of movie sets.
The framing also is revealing. Breaking with the horizontality of the screen, Francois Fontaine built a gallery of predominant vertical formats. It defines the series in the genre of portrait, a portrait of cinema as much as of these vibrant icons.
Laurence Cornet
Exhibition
From November 8 to December 22, 2012
A. Galerie
12, rue Léonce Reynaud
75116 Paris
France
Silenzio !
Photographs by François Fontaine
Texts by Anouk Aimée and Dominique Païni
Publisher : Les éditions de l’OEil
98 pages
25 euros
