From January 18 to March 3, 2018, Galerie Argentic in Paris presents a selection of about fifty photographs by Jean-Claude Gautrand, French photography’s privileged witness. This selection covers over 60 years of work and brings together his most beautiful series, including Métalopolis and Le Galet, featured here.
Métalopolis (1964)
Made in 1964, Métalopolis is Jean-Claude Gautrand’s first extensive series. Its title was inspired by Fritz Lang iconic film, Métropolis, which imagines city life in a dehumanized future. Taken on the construction site of the Parisian ring road, the photographs are consistent with the current of Subjektive Fotografie and with the constructivist approach. Their modernity is due to the fierceness of the gaze and the desire to pare down and refine. These dense images, pregnant with meaning, yet muted, are the battlefield of black and white, light and darkness, and seize the evocative power of things in order to tell a story. The heavy areas of blackness of the crossbeams, the delicate lines of rebar, constitute a form of writing, a calligraphy which reveals the influence of Hartung and Soulages. “One must eliminate everything that is superfluous, direct one’s eye like a dictator. And one must take the viewer’s gaze and guide it toward anything that may be worth seeing,” advised the photographer Brassaï. At the time, this was an undeniably innovative approach.
Le Galet (1968–1969)
The series Le Galet constitutes a first turning point in the evolution of Gautrand’s oeuvre which opened onto a more generously poetic approach to the subject. Every photograph is here a word, and the whole makes up a phrase that narrates a fantastic story, a story filled with memory and reminiscence: the Easter Island, Stonehenge, or, closer to our time, the monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Perfect like a Brancusi sculpture, this white stone, a veritable cosmic egg discovered on the beach and displayed in landscapes evoking the origin of the world, is a veritable poem that invites reverie and contemplation.
“With the images that Jean-Claude Gautrand was able to make using a simple pebble, the sky, and the sea,” the specialist Yves Lorelle explained in 1968, “photography becomes more intellectual, the deeper you delve into it. It becomes charged with signs which are too symbolic or too esoteric to be discerned at first “reading,” but which captivate and slowly surrender. And all of a sudden, as if dealing with stolen memories, the veil lifts over this esoteric egg, this giant pebble emerging from the depths of time, this Holy Grail, this menhir of all the promised lands. And we are fascinated at once by the raw quality of the sensation and by the density of what it had concealed. All the origins of the world and their thousand Geneses, all alike, are there, in that simple, luxuriant photo of a pebble…”
Jean-Claude Gautrand, Itinéraire d’un photographe
January 18 to March 3, 2018
Galerie Argentic
43 Rue Daubenton
75005 Paris
France
