Looking at Pierre de Fenoÿl’s landscape photographs is unsettling and enchanting while being strangely familiar. That’s one of the photographer’s great feats. Through the repeated and ever-changing precision of his framing, his perspectives, his mastery of light, his use of clouds resisting the oblivion of air like the grains in the film that distributes the crescendoing contrasts, he leaves his mark on the landscape. We do not recognize the places, only the features of the vision that breaks apart the real, this culture of space, this dialectic between the concrete and the abstract, this keen intellectual agility in the act of photography, interrupting the violence of beauty.
Pierre de Fenoÿl often wrote that one does not take a photograph—one receives it. True, but there’s still the way, and especially the form, in which it is received. Rare are those able to use light like this: it flows, shatters, forming compact and impenetrable blocks, the abstraction bursts forth from the shadowy puddles, the elements float. The interweaving on the space, surface and depths is the magic behind a vision that is unsatisfied with mere reflections of the real and analyzes the appearance. The photographer employs his receptive grammar, through successive touches he closes in on his perception.
Fenoÿl’s work is discrete and intimate. It never tries to stand out. I would say that it rebels against the opacity of the visible. The black and white, the material of the reality in question, is the light between his world and ours, where he creates. “No place but the place,” wrote Mallarmé. It builds up from melancholy, on the infinite loneliness of sensation, becoming a confrontation, it become the accomplice of complexity. The concentrations it takes for Pierre to erase the subject, reeling in time as it unspools, is expressionist. He squeezes the shape to derive its essence. The choices he makes show what moves him. The black hues and shadows forbid any hint of romanticism. The clouds threaten, the foregrounds disturb, halting the gaze while organizing the space like curtains on a stage. It’s a difficult work that can seem, at a careless first glance, banal. Far from it. The result is not a collection of images but the exhaustion of an image to explore, beyond its appearance, its metaphysics. It escapes simplification because the landscapes Fenoÿl photographs, once he receives them, are no longer the same. It’s impossible for anyone to see them the same gain. The landscapes have been struck by lightning and now exist only on the paper print. Fenoÿl’s photographs become the contracted presence of time and the enigma of a wait with no return.
EXHIBITION
Pierre de Fenoÿl (1945-1987). An imaginary geography
From June 20th to October 31st, 2015
Jeu de Paume – Château de Tours
25 avenue André Malraux
37000 Tours
France
+33 (0)2 47 21 61 95
Tuesday – Sunday 2pm – 6pm
Free Entrance
http://www.jeudepaume.org
UPCOMING
Pierre de Fenoÿl Paysages conjugués
From September 5 to December 31st, 2015
Galerie Le Réverbère
38 Rue Burdeau
69001 Lyon
France
Tél. : +33 (0)4 72 00 06 72
http://www.galerielereverbere.com
BOOK
« Pierre de Fenoÿl. An imaginary geography »
Texts by Virginie Chardin, Jacques Damez, Peter Galassi.
Éditions Jeu de Paume / Xavier Barral.
240 pages 24 x 28 cm
144 photographs
Price : 50 euros
ISBN : 9782365110730
http://exb.fr
