In Detachment, the new photographic series by Nicolas Dhervillers, nature is frosty and very white. The roads are fleeing we know not where, or bend tightly. The forests look like jungles. There are lost mountains, peaks and ravines, a metal bridge between two worlds, a spectacular waterfall. There are steaming waters and skies, wet like blotting-paper, pierced in places by a distant, almost Elysian sun that shines down, mirage or the truth, on tiny anachronistic characters.
These are the Amish: women, men, children who gaze at rivers, the emptiness or the horizon, who walk in the middle of a blankets of snow and on the bare earth, who wander in the depths of the woods, set themselves in the light or at the foot of a spring, on a rock, on the road, who, chin on the fist like the famous Thinker, contemplate nature and their condition.
These are the Amish, seventeenth century Anabaptists, who, by the waters, sometimes steamy, sometimes clear, hesitate between fate and flight, to reject or embrace the first of their rules: “You will not conform to this world that surrounds you.”
These are the faces, forgotten, images stolen from the internet, that seem to have lost their memory and found, in Nicolas’ photographs, a place, a corner, waiting to make sense of their existence. Because in Dhervillers’ work, the landscapes are the same as solitude: they are metaphysical places, meditations. They are inner experiences, poetic and romantic.
And because the days fall asleep and the nights are awake, the scenery is bathed in a twilight gloom, the scenes always seem to step away from the edge of the cinematic sequence, permanently, the mystery and strangeness remains. The artist, as the perfect producer, makes fictional and aesthetic collages, halfway between the paintings of the Flemish school, Caspar Davis Friedrich’s pictures and the wanderings of Tarkovski’s characters.
With Detachment, he gives the Amish Anabaptist community a territory in high definition, a second life, another history, a possible return to Switzerland, where it all began. We don’t know if Nicolas’ miniature actors will be saved, disenchanted, if they will be trapped in their solitary convictions or if they will make the choice to go into the real world, even if this world is crazy and broken in places, even if this world is killing itself with hatred, even if this world sometimes doesn’t dream anymore; this world is also capable of the greatest adventures.
Detachment was devised in 2015, after the wave of attacks in Paris, it has just ended a trilogy begun in 2011, the last part of the series that also includes My Sentimental Archives and Hommages.
Julie Estève
Julie Estève is a journalist specialising in contemporary art, based in Paris, France.
Nicolas Dhervillers, Detachment
From 26th January to 11th March 2017
School Gallery
322 rue Saint-Martin
75003 Paris
France
