Thibaut Cuisset died on the 19th of January he was 58 years old, while his works were in the middle of being shown in various exhibitions and while he was preparing his “poetic and sensitive atlas” with the publisher Steidl.
Thibaut had done us the honour of working with the Les Filles de Calvaire gallery since 2001, on personal and collective exhibitions in Paris and Brussels.
In 1995, knowing my intention to open a gallery of contemporary art, a painter friend of mine spoke to me about Thibaut and told me how he admired the photos of Italy Thibaut had done during his stay at the Villa Medici; I looked at his work; there was an elegance about it which was not what one expected when one thought of Italy but I was struck by the accuracy of his vision, the precision of the lines and the colours, the same as those I liked so much in Italian painting and architecture.
I got to know the man little by little , going further into his professional and private world, I understood his obsession with accuracy, he brought the power of the moment to his images, through a combination of place, light and colour.
No compromise or carelessness, neither too simplified nor beautified, at the same time Thibaut lets us see the reality of the place and his emotion in the face of it; he passes on a view of the world that he had developed and trained in Morocco and Egypt before his work for DATAR.
One recognises a picture of Cuisset: his eye, his light, his purity, his cinematographic vision and his affinity with painting produce this inimitable “concentration on place” without anecdote, with neither human nor colourised pathos, most of the time without people; Cuisset created “portraits of landscapes” whether completely away from or within cities.
During a stay in my home, on the limestone plateau of the Cevennes, he took a picture of a gate. This picture, oversize, a one-off, is a perfect portrait of the place and its character: the gate is so rusty that you can hardly distinguish it in the landscape, it is of no use except as an unlikely sign in the middle of the scrub. It doesn’t close anything, it is a test and an invitation to a walk between the tragic and solitude: Thibaut shot it “in profile” in a grey light “without quality”.
Thibaut Cuisset was a discreet and modest man, curious, constantly searching, sometimes anxious in the extreme. The rigour that he showed in his photographic work served him as a reference and an anchor and allowed him to work out his apprehension of reality.
We miss him.
Stéphane Magnan
Stéphane Magnan is the director of Les Filles du Calvaire gallery, in Paris.
