The Maison Européenne de la Photographie presents until June 5th, Dark Light, an exhibition by French filemaker and photographer Tadzio.
His recent photos provide no landmarks: although architecture plays a key role, it can only be identified through recollection of earlier works that have taught us to recognize its outlines. Indeed, nothing—or almost nothing—allows us to recognize, on first sight, these clustered masses, these sharp or jagged lines, and these intersecting angles as being part of a building, especially since Tadzio enjoys finding an unlikely angle that will banish any hint of narrative from the picture. There is no effect of texture, nor any graffiti to guide the eye. Far from it. There is a marvelous exploration of monochrome—if one can still use that word when it comes to strict variations on gray (extending to a sometimes lightly tinted black)—that further transforms these fragments of reality into surprising abstract paintings. They evoke Ad Reinhardt’s canvases in which a far-from-uniform black ultimately reveals the geometric structure that serves as compositional backbone to his painting, thanks to tiny variations in shades that the eye only discovers after a long acclimation.
This incursion into the world of darkness—whether the flash of a storm or, as Tadzio implies, the light of today’s world—reminds us that the role of an artist, whether painter or photographer, is more than ever a question of “bringing into view,” as Paul Éluard put it.
Daniel Abadie
From Tadzio’s Dark Light, from « Dark Light », Éditions du Regard, 2016
EXHIBITION
Dark Light
Tadzio
Prints made by French Picto Lab
From April 6th to June 5th, 2016
Maison Européenne de la Photographie
5/7 rue de Fourcy
75004 Paris
France
http://www.mep-fr.org
Wednesday to Sunday 11am – 8pm
BOOK
Lumière Noire
Tadzio
Book Signing on May 21st, 2016 5 – 6.30pm at MEP
Editions du Regard
Author : Daniel Abadie
80 pages – 36 photographs
Release : April 2016
EAN : 978 284105 3490 19,50 €
http://www.editions-du-regard.com
