Patrick Taberna started this series six years ago. « A contretemps » (On the off beat) is a long and slow work about his nearests, mainly produced during different trips. His family is the common thread of his piece of work, and the trips, even nearby, remain an excuse, to create. This need of the trip (even the closest) is a stimulus for the imagination, to regain through it a sense of childhood where every day is full of discoveries, and the mind is fully dedicated to the moment.
“A contretemps” is a work on the feelings of childhood, on impressions lasting in memories, in this slight lag of time in our daily lives.
Patrick Taberna manages in his photographs to share happiness with a look that is both simple and unique. Bernard Plossu wrote in his afterword to “Au fil des jours”: “What I feel, seeing those pictures of Patrick Taberna, is that he needs them to live …”. Indeed, these pictures are important because it starts from a need to retain (to regain) this primordial feeling, both common and absolutely personal, that “Rosebud” is in us more than we think: the childhood memory.
Didier Brousse
What I feel, seeing those pictures of Patrick Taberna, is that he needs them to live … We must see to live or live to see? We go from specific locations to vague places, from noise to rustles, from an smell to a sensation, from solitary images to voluntarily poetically grouped together pictures…
The photos are in color but do we really give attention to these details ? Does black and white really exist ? And what about color ? This is probably why Patrick Taberna speaks to us, what counts is not the square or rectangle, or color or black and white, what counts is the fact that these pictures exist because he decided to see them and to take them.
The visual photography, arts, literature, etc. …: all these are false barriers, there are only images that speak, and others which have nothing to say (some speak because they have nothing to say, with language as commonplace ? (Poetry is not that simple…). What creates the link between a woman view from the rear in front of cypresses, a very Italian image, to an aquarium of goldfish? The diptychs, triptychs, quadriptychs, can depict “a world”, even if most of the time a single image can make it on her own. Because a gap between two buildings is all that remains of the space and sound, because behind the trees there are days and days of toil in a field, because it’s raining on a colour bridge in black and white, and before dying, we have to take the time to see, to take photographs. That’s the way it is.
Bernard Plossu
Exhibitions :
Au fil des jours
Mau 8th – May 26th, 2012
Galerie Tosei
5-18-20 Chuo, Nakano-ku,
Tokyo, Japan, 164-0011
A Contretemps
April 14th – May 27th, 2012
Galerie Tanto Tempo
Kensho Building 3F, 2-1-3, Sakaemachi-dori, Chuo-ku,
Kobe, Japan
