From January 18 to March 3, 2018, Galerie Argentic in Paris presents a selection of about fifty photographs by Jean-Claude Gautrand. This selection covers over 60 years of work and brings together his most beautiful series, including a handful of moments of flâneurie around 1960s Paris.
Since he walked his very first pair of shoes to shreds on Parisian pavements, the city has been a constant in Jean-Claude Gautrand’s photographic work. At home within the perimeter of the Parisian ring road, he is permanently looking for live and visual informations, from Montparnasse to La Villette, or from La Nation to the Trocadéro. Along the way, he has collected moments, encounters, novel or agonizing sights.
In contrast to the major themes featured earlier in today’s edition, we find here a bit of the humanist emphasis he, and his friends, such as Doisneau and Ronis, were steeped in. Gautrand, however, possesses a sharper sense of design, which lends his forms and lines greater eloquence; his images are like a breath of fresh air, a recreation where the flâneur in him is in his proper element. “To walk around, flâner, wrote Balzac, is a science, it’s the gastronomy of the eye.”
Using a visual language of maximum diversity, Gautrand captures either the past or the futuristic forms of permanently evolving architecture, and the light that occasionally bathes certain places in magic. The human figure present throughout the different encounters dissolves in this veritable street theater, thus offering us countless moments of emotion and wonder.
To the inquiring mind that knows how to look, Paris, a city both changing and diverse, offers the possibility of discovering the exceptional within the everyday. Gautrand’s images are a proof, attesting that Paris is truly a moveable feast.
Jean-Claude Gautrand, Itinéraire d’un photographe
January 18 to March 3, 2018
Galerie Argentic
43 Rue Daubenton
75005 Paris
France
