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Louis Jammes, Migrations

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Louis Jammes was born in Carcassone in the south of France in 1958. At the beginning of the 1980s, at the very start of his career, he worshipped the artists of his personal pantheon, those who inspired his own artistic development like members of the Beat Generation, Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, then his close friends, the burgeoning neo-expression movement and his contemporaries: Keith Haring, Jean- Michel Basquiat, Robert Combas, and Julian Schnabel, in settings that he conceived as evocations of their work. Then he took his studio into the street where he combined photography and painting to create scenery behind anonymous people in the district of Barbès, before becoming involved in countries ravaged by war, and engaging with the local population. He didn’t want to bear witness to these conflicts in the way that a reporter would, but to take part, to be part of them: he returned from these experiences with some fine images, of great pictorial quality.

Widely known for his work in Sarajevo in 1993; the children that he transformed into angels, silk-screened them then stuck them onto images of the battlefields, remain forever etched in our minds, both as witnesses of and actors in this devastating conflict. In all of this work, it’s a matter of creating a new photographic style.

Louis Jammes’ recent work on migrants, created in the Balkans and shown at the Aspirateur in Narbonne caused such problems for the local authorities that the exhibition was shut down. In the images we can see the smiling Syrian faces, determined and full of hope, as they go down the road of exile at the Serbian border. As they make their way beneath the leaden sky, it is pierced by luminous rays, as in a painting of the Annunciation from the Renaissance. These visions contradict the usual bleak pictures, of the large scale human displacement  relayed by the media. Some of them are on show at the Galerie Rabouan Moussion.

This exhibition is constructed as a retrospective journey, tracing his origins: the origins of his photographic work but also his past, the origins of the world, the Creation, of a paradise-like nature soon to be lost. It comprises several series, some of which were begun more than twenty years ago – some works done in tandem, in particular with Jean-Michel Basquiat

Viewers can also be confronted by portraits of young Pygmies who have been expelled from their region. While on a trip in 1996, Louis Jammes discovered that part of the Ugandan primary forest, at the source of the Nile – a river identified as paradise in the Old Testament and the Koran, had been bought by an American foundation in order to create a reserve for the protection of the great apes, and, for this good cause, throwing out the Pygmies who lived there. He returns to this still-current problem for a disenchanted observation, with artistic intervention by scratching on the negatives or by the addition of photosensitive liquid that acts on the images like an operation on the skin, scarring at random while the negatives are developing.

We remember the photographs that Louis Jammes brought back from Pripiat and Chernobyl, where he put himself at risk by entering the sarcophagus isolating the power station. More recently he went back to Fukushima, asking his Japanese friends to revisit their own experiences of the tsunami and the nuclear catastrophe. This resulted in a series of photos and a video relating  their view of the disaster. It is a return to the origins of creation, matter, and therefore the atom, and the way in which humankind has been overtaken by this discovery.

It appears to us that the world is constructed on a globalised experience that is partial, being both biased and incomplete, inherited from the 15th century’s great discoveries, beginning with that of the new world. Last July, Louis Jammes went in search of this terra incognita, of Cuba and its virgin territories. He has returned with views of a paradise that are identical to those of the banks of the Aude, the river of his native land.

Alice Cazaux

Louis Jammes
Until 12th November
Galerie Rabouan Moussion
11 rue Pastourelle
75003 Paris
France
www.rabouanmoussion.com

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