It will never get dark on the sea of our memories. Somewhere, in the shadow of the dancing rain, stands a photographer who paints time stretching languidly. Far from the implacable metronome of the ephemeral, Stéphane Mahé offers us his tenderly faded skies on which dreams are born, his feverish landscapes of loneliness populated by intimate resonances, his dull silhouettes hesitating on the edge of an evening. As a star-strewn night pours out in all its infinity on a summer day or the shadow of a mysterious wood closes over frail human skiffs, we hear a murmur in the drunken dust of the sky. blue hour: “I let the spleen of our loves sit on my heart … the twilight of our idylls is not without grace … the bitter wind will dry the tears of melancholy on my cheeks … tomorrow is lost in the shimmering waters of memory… ”.
So we approach, cautiously, stealthily, so as not to slip into the abyss of memory or sink into the fiery chapels of nostalgia in order to sneak into its precarious little theaters, sometimes surreal, always poetic. And one is seized with a fleeting drunkenness of the reason. We think of a mirage, a facetiae of the reason, a fainting of the senses. The exile is interior, the word sepia, the living dreams enamored with summer foam with azure peaks intoxicate our minds and revive our melancholy. Have we forgotten the keys to happiness on the way to our certainties? Our meditations denude the silence. A dream-like slowness invades us and grieves our mood as we stride down the haunted castles of the past. The sad marriage with reality is not for now. We find ourselves playing hide and seek with our feelings; the coming and going of waves of emotion dies on the hot sands of our emotions. Here we are seized by the joy of the fireworks of the ether coloring, by the iridescent reflections of the flames of festive evenings, the hope of rediscovering lost pleasures. And the horizon seems to exalt this thirst for infinity with great volutes as all chimeras become possible.
Happy, we run barefoot on a frail stone ledge that grows over the abyss overlooking the sea. A kite passes free in the breeze. It broke his moorings. “On blue summer evenings, I will go out on the trails, Pecked by the wheat, I will tread the small grass: Dreamer, I will feel the freshness on my feet. I will let the wind bathe my bare head, ”writes Rimbaud. The happiness of photographing radiates. So, we contemplate this very particular grain which makes the beating heart of the image, a sumptuously melancholy poem, which reminds us of those fragile moments of tenderness, over which the shadow of the tragic still hovers. Delicate, Stéphane Mahé leaves us to our awakened dreams while the gaze never stops spinning, through a window, through a door, so many escapes towards the light … Towards an elsewhere … Here … over there, where wandering appears as a photographic quest.
Alexandra Palka
Stéphane Mahé : Ici et Là-bas… Fugue mélancolique
from October 14 to November 27, 2021
Galerie L’Entrée des Artistes
25 rue des Tournelles, 75004 Paris
