Galerie XII Paris presents the work of Danish artist Susanne Wellm who combines photography with weaving. Gabriel Bauret writes this text.
The history of photography, since its invention, is that of a conquest to gain more details, to master the restitution of lights and colors, to the point of giving an ever more realistic representation of the world. And as in a pendulum swing, artists have conversely worked to find a summary approach to our environment to better appeal to the imagination and get closer to fiction. Susanne Welmm invented a machine to play with blur, to give the illusion of movement, to introduce an element of mystery.
To do this, she drew on a reserve of photos from all sources and whose authors are often anonymous; this reserve, which sometimes allowed her to superimpose different images, offers a material from which she carried out subtle manipulations: an operation that can be likened to that of a weaving which makes it intertwine, like a musical counterpoint, long strips of prints with threads distributed very regularly and methodically on the surface of the work, or sometimes interrupted in the middle of the photographs. This weaving thus forms a frame and filters vision. The artistic gesture focuses on this intertwining, the hand guiding the loom; it is lodged in the work of the very material of the work which will be offered to our gaze. The subject of the image is relegated to the background as if the artist’s attitude wanted to demonstrate a form of humility towards it. A curtain has fallen between the spectator and the stage, but we can see that behind it a world lives and moves, the transparency of the fabric, as sometimes in the theater, allowing us to guess presences: we perceive reality in fragments. And the legend that the artist gives here to each of the works takes us on the path of a story in which the idea of a journey emerges, the crossing of an urban landscape, the exploration of unknown interiors.
Gabriel Bauret
Susanne Wellm : De l’autre côté
April 19, 2024 to July 13, 2024
Galerie XII Paris
14 Rue des Jardins Saint-Paul
75004 Paris, France
https://www.galeriexii.com/fr/
