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.
