Ruin – Reconstruction
Timequakes was born from my experience of the earthquake that occurred in Japan in March 2011. As an outlet for what I experienced at that time, I transposed the chaos of material destruction with temporal collisions. These are votive pictures created through the mingling of 15th to 16th century painted portraits with contemporary photo portraits against a luminous background.
Compression and Layering
I have a number of photographs that I originally shot, compiled and stored as a source for future works – portraits of models with eternal, unchanging beauty, copies of paintings collected in my own imaginary art museum, and night images of Tokyo in quavering light that will become a metaphor for the earthquake. For this series I have tapped into these and reworked them into new compositions. Using this method, they appear as a compressed layering that exposes the temporal collisions and sedimentations.
Concrete – Abstract
When photographs first appeared, paintings tended to become more abstract. Reflecting this trend in Timequakes, I mixed character expression in a background made to look like a contemporary context. The hybrid character images in the portrait genre form a bridge between painting and photography. At the same time, they form a link between ancient and contemporary art, and figuration and abstraction.
Recollection and Oblivion Reviewing our historical legacy, I combined works of the past by using composition, juxtaposition and collage techniques. Through this bias of borrowing and appropriation, I attempted to create illusions with the value and intensity of imagined and real memories. The pictures I create are faithful to the workings of memory – they are as clear as deception and are indeed morally questionable.
Interpretation and Betrayal
Timequakes is one speculation about our cultural heritage and the collective memory we share as a society. Today this memory is not only in a saturated state but has lost all useful markers and is threatened by crisis. This is because the eternal present is crushing and flattening our historical perspective. Beyond the works that appear as pretentious aesthetic propositions and imitations, Timequakes poses a fundamental question regarding the false nature inherent in all pictures and paintings.
Sabine Pigalle was born in 1963, and is currently based in Paris. After studying literature at Sorbonne University, she stepped into fashion photography. She worked alongside Helmut Newton for four years, then chose to turn to a more personal pursuit and follow a path toward plastic photography. As befitting her literary background, she maintains her taste for words and their association with images. Her career in the world of fashion reappears in many of her series in which she questions such themes as beauty and appearance. She enjoys reviewing the history of paintings and religious references, collective myths or individual phobias, and creating sophisticated and attractive works. She exhibited for the first time in Tokyo in 2006, then again in 2009, participating in the “No Man’s Land” exhibition in the old buildings of the French Embassy. She is regularly presented in international fairs on contemporary art.
She is represented by the Louise Alexander Gallery.
Timequakes
Photographs by Sabine Pigalle
From January 17th to February 9th, 2014
Chanel Ginza Building
4th floor, 3-5-3 Ginza
Chuo-ku, Tokyo
Japan
Hours: 12:00 – 20:00
Admission: Free
