By bringing together eight artists around the theme of the fold, the Binôme Gallery, jointly curated by Valérie Cazin and Emilie Traverse, has once again compiled a bold and ambitious group exhibition. As ever, it explores the limits of photography and its forays into sculpture, objects, and the pictorial—this time through the works of Mustapha Azeroual, Hélène Bellenger, Michel Le Belhomme, Thomas Sauvin, and Sergio Valenzuela Escobedo.
Artistic irony or photographic self-mockery, the fold in Alfredo Coloma’s carpet is an excerpt of the series Modern Problems which symbolically associates daily failings with the failure of modernism. But an economy of gestures does not mean an economy of the gaze or the thought in this association between text and image, where the distance between—rather trivial—reality and its representation is highly equivocal. The figure in the carpet can be perceived in the trough of the wave, in the poetic, perhaps even political, movement of alternation.
An attitude and photography of “anti-mastery” characterizes Michel Le Belhomme’s series Les Deux Labyrinthes. Image #109, After Fischli and Weiss is a nod toward Rock on Top of Another Rock by the Swiss duo. Le Belhomme analyzes landscape as a power relationship at a tipping point. Made without the help of photomontage, this image of photographic sculpture confounds points of view, plays with unfolding and instability as well as mocks monumentalism.
Hélène Bellenger similarly explores the eye at work in her relationship with landscape, reworking this motif in a sequence of stock images. “Untitled (posters),” which belongs to her series Placebo landscapes, it is an installation made up of over a dozen rolled up posters placed upright on the floor. The corny iconography of sunsets over sandy beaches is broken up with the cylindrical surfaces showing only partial images. Thus constrained, the viewers must bend over, screw up their eyes, just to find a vantage point amid this spatial configuration of images.
Partaking of similar intentionality, Thomas Sauvin invites us to discover ninety photographic prints concealed within the labyrinthine album inspired by a Chinese sewing kit from the 1960s. A hybrid work, Xian holds the same promise of magic as once associated with Renaissance cabinets of curiosity or Chinese apothecary cabinets.
Beckoning us to a metaphysical journey, Sergio Valenzuela Escobedo explores reflective surfaces: water, mirrors… En el reflejo del agua durmiente, or Narcissus, is a series of ten Polaroid image transfers which seem to peel meandering reflections from the camera, a new instrument of knowledge and encounter with the Other.
Another self-reflexive image, Marie Clerel’s La Bourboule, 22/10, 16h00 gives us a sensory experience of the texture of the fold. This is a cyanotype created by the sole imprint of sunlight on a previously creased and distressed piece of fabric. A contact-free image, this photograph registers only its own mishandling and ambient luminosity. The act of straightening it out, by ironing and stretching the fabric on a frame, evokes the contemplation of a photograph without a referent, an imprint of itself.
By contrast, Mustapha Azeroual’s Phenomenon is a malleable photograph. The base image is an aerial shot, taken with a low-resolution phone camera, of a mountain range that becomes completely flattened through the degradation of digital data. Azeroual transferred the image onto the supple surface of Japanese paper using the gum bichromate process. The low-quality image becomes charged thanks to the material texture of the folds, and the new surface lends it its subject, its depth, its zones of light and shadow.
In yet another way, Anaïs Boudot explores the process of the appearance of the image within its own folds created by switching between analog and digital. Taken from the series Fêlures, these hybrid images of the sea and perpetual waves evoke perceptual and memory disorders and the impermanence of things, like drapes about to be raised.
L’oeil plié
Galerie Binôme
February 3 to March 25, 2017
19 rue Charlemagne
75004 Paris
France
