Israel Ariño spent two months in an artist’s residency at the Domaine de Kerguéhennec in Brittany. Locals often tell a story about an old house, lost somewhere on the estate, that becomes visible only after nightfall. Ariño set out to find it. The night seemed favorable for revelations and metamorphoses. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he started to discern other dimensions and new densities and temporalities at the edge of rationality.
The book La pesanteur du lieu is an account of this oneiric, nocturnal wandering. Israel Ariño offers us a constellation of sensory and mental (perhaps sentimental) visions. His dark, velvety photographs give substance to darkness by evoking and capturing the emergence of things that come alive at nighttime, outside the purview of the ordinary, and subvert the order of the world. These things belong to the realm of the marvelous, like a fairytale that blends reality and the supernatural. Once upon a time, there was … a dark dark wood, an unusual crystal, antelopes frozen in midair, a breast bared, a startled owl, a house with gleaming windows.
A photographer, Israel Ariño is also an editor. His design of La pesanteur du lieu contributes to the perception of the intermediary territories he explores. The book’s cover is pale and as supple and soft as animal skin. It is printed on ultra thin Bible paper. Pages with images alternate with transparent blank sheets in a game of concealing and unveiling, like sedimentary layers that are peeled away as we turn the pages. The arrangement of the photographs follows a fictional narrative and slowly progresses into the thick of the night, constantly playing on gravity and weightlessness.
The book, imbued with a sense of mystery, expands the limits of our perception onto discoveries, signs, and apparitions, leaving the reader suspended, as if held by a thread, always on the point of hallucinating.
Caroline Benichou
Caroline Benichou is a writer and an exhibition curator specializing in photography. She lives and works in Paris.
Israel Ariño is a Spanish photographer born in 1974. He lives and works in France and Spain With Montse Puig, he runs the publishing house Ediciones Anómalas.
Israel Ariño, La pesanteur du lieu
Published by Ediciones Anómalas, Barcelona, 2017
Slipcased volume. Format: 32 x 24 cm, 120 pp.
€35
ISBN : 979-10-91494-23-6
