The Swiss Romain Mader, winner of the Paul Huf Award 2017 funded by the FOAM Museum in Amsterdam, explores the nature of photography and its relationship to reality. Galerie Dix9 Hélène Lacharmoise in Paris features the photographer’s first French solo exhibition entitled From Davos with Love.
Romain Mader’s work tackles contemporary social and cultural issues (individualism, nomadism, personal mythologies) supporting European identity, which is seen as a paradigm. An immersion in his world reveals a multitude of forms in which his ideas are expressed, at the intersection of autobiographic journal, fiction, and sociological inquiry. Himself immersed in specific social environments (a journey to Ukraine, an afternoon on the beach, a visit to a car show), Romain Mader figures in the image both as its author and as a witness of the social reality around him.
The title of this exhibition alludes to a conversation between Romain Mader and the curator Théo-Mario Coppola at the Schatzalp Sanatorium, now a luxury hotel in Davos, Switzerland—a highly symbolic location chosen by Thomas Mann to decipher Europe in transformation through a gallery of odd characters revolving around the protagonist of the Magic Mountain.
“We see the world at the same time as we are making it. We deconstruct the world at the same time as we are taking part in it. The philosophical reconciliation between constructivism (the identification of overarching social patterns) and phenomenology (the enactment of personal experience) takes place in post-absurdist aesthetic, continuing the literary experiments of Nicolai Gogol and Franz Kafka.” Surprise, quirkiness, originality, and a flare for the unusual allow Romain Mader’s aesthetic register to capture the reality. He contemplates his contemporaries in the same way as he raises the question of his own identity with respect to others. Is he what others see? Is he to himself the person he represents?
Romain Mader: From Davos with Love !
March 17 to April 28, 2018
Galerie Dix9 Hélène Lacharmoise
19 Rue des Filles du Calvaire
75003 Paris
France
