On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Jean Dieuzaide, the City of Toulouse is devoting a major retrospective exhibition to this important photographer.
The City of Toulouse, which owns most of the Dieuzaide collection and wishes to bring it to life, presents more than 200 works and archives, sometimes unpublished, revealing the talent of an artist capable of transcending reality and of assuming the role of a man essential to the recognition of photography.
The exhibition offers 148 works, and 81 documents, most of which come from the Jean Dieuzaide collection kept in the municipal archives of Toulouse. Contact sheets, enlarged contacts, books, periodicals, films put the work and its conditions of development into perspective in the artistic and cultural context of “the Thirty Glorious Years” 1945 to 1975, and the following decades. Françoise Denoyelle is the curator of the exhibition.
Jean Dieuzaide, 60 Years of Photography : The Retrospective by Françoise Denoyelle
Jean Dieuzaide has long been presented as a photographer of reality, the witness of fleeting happiness, the artisan of photographs embodying the harmony of the world, relaying the nobility of human works. Away from the tutelary shadows, the beauty of the boats and nets, the splendor of the abbatial churches and their ambulatory, the attentive fervor of the imprint of time on the leaves, the friendship for the everyday servants embodied in a mop and the mastery of the craftsman.
Dieuzaide escaped from it, tending to conquer the beyond where are united in the same enthusiasm, devotion and ardor deploying the meandering of the work revealing the artist, the ultimate threshold of reporting, he revoked the decisive, suspending it off-screen, inviting the contemplation of objects whose chance, the angle of the shot, stage the distribution. In a wandering towards shifting shores, he relegated his spirituality, carried away by the fascination of the shimmering pitch. On the fringes of the landscape, he identified aerial regions where abstract shapes are sketched out for uncertain paths, improbable places where the mark of man is inscribed. At a distance from the sciences, in the laboratory of his workshop, Dieuzaide reconnected with ancient mythologies, erecting cathedrals of modernity, playing his experimental score between shadow and light, bends and superimpositions.
The artist, Dieuzaide was part of the dynamics of the Thirty Glorious Years, whose transformations he sublimated. He shaped realities born of a title, from the diversion of an industrial element, the blooming of flowers, establishing a sensitive dialogue between ethics and metaphysics.
Françoise Denoyelle, exhibition curator, 2021.
Jean Dieuzaide, 60 Ans de Photographie : La Retrospective
December 4, 2021 – March 6, 2022
Couvent des Jacobins Place des Jacobins, allée Maurice Prin (entrée par l’église)
31 000 Toulouse
