Les Douches la Galerie presents Voyages en Italie, a new exhibition dedicated to Hervé Guibert. Through portraits of his friends, his loves, and still lifes of intimate objects, taken between 1979 and 1990, the exhibition illustrates how Italy has occupied a central place in the writer-photographer’s career, both as a source of aesthetic inspiration and as a territory of creation. A text by Gérard Lefort presents the exhibition.
For several centuries, the journey to Italy has been a tourist and cultural journey that has inspired painters, architects, musicians, at least one filmmaker (Roberto Rossellini and his film of the same name) and a few writers (Stendhal, etc.).
Hervé Guibert gives his journey to Italy an obviously literary and, just as intense, photographic turn. In both cases, the work, is timeless and exiled.
Over the course of his time, from the Villa Medici in Rome where he resided from 1987 to 1989, to the island of Elba where he has been buried since 1992, it is a carousel of black and white images. This black and white is the Red and the Black of Hervé Guibert, the new Julien Sorel as Stendhal describes him. Handsome, supremely handsome, with eyes “which, in quiet moments, announced reflection and fire.” Photographs of ice and erotic temperament, where, as usual with Guibert, shamelessness is modesty.
The devil, probably, is in the details but so is the angel. The Italian light of Hervé Guibert’s photographs is a light a giorno, a supernatural annunciation that always bursts from an angle like in a southern Vermeer. The photographic snapshots become pictorial moments where the indirect sun geometrizes the space, cutting it into a mosaic of shadows and glows.
We think of Goethe’s last words on his deathbed. What did he say? “Mehr Licht” or “Mehr nichts”? More light or more nothing? There is no confusion. Light and nothingness are the same thing. On the margins of Goethe, Hervé Guibert’s Italian photographs are a lesson in darkness, a nocturne, a vital refrain that helps us live.
Gérard Lefort
Hervé Guibert : Voyages en Italie
January 30 – April 5, 2025
Les Douches la Galerie
5 rue Legouvé
75010 Paris
+33 1 78 94 03 00
www.lesdoucheslagalerie.com
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