One of our correspondents Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret has just sent us 2 of his favourites. The first one is Philippe Litzler: travels, travels.
Philippe Litzler (director of OpenEye) does not seek to give a touristic vision of the places he visits. His way of looking is more impertinent and gets closer to people in everyday landscapes. He still refuses to sacrifice to caricature. He prefers tenderness not without beauty and humor. Both are distilled by the play of shapes and colors.
There is neither nostalgia nor melancholy. Lives intersect out of season: and those who cross the images go about their business. Litzler knows how to wait for them as he waits for the light to be perfect. But everything is created unpretentiously. The photographer lets himself be guided by what he feels. Playing on forms as complex as they are simple, he offers series of variations with additional image on one side, additional reality on the other: it is an appropriation where various themes intersect.
The photographer seems most of the time to have fun breaking the sovereign clichés of the portrait, of the landscape. Everything remains touching in an ironic game. The photographer understood that deconstruction no longer had anything to deconstruct. It is necessary to move on to something more serious: the play of spaces and times in the tiny journey of life. It is enough to invent a world.
In short, Philippe Litzler makes it possible to reach or penetrate what is in the landscape and what is implicit. Simplicity leads to sophistication. But the reverse is also true. Provocatively at times (always subtly and aporically) the artist sometimes pretends to sanctify the landscape while giving it an almost null and void character. And this in a desire to approach as closely as possible with implicit humor those who live or visit there.
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
See OPENEYE website www.openeyelemagazine.fr
