The series of photographs French photographer Véronique Ellena is showing to the passers-by in the rue Pierre Sémard in Toulon, close to the Hôtel Départemental des Arts, has been thought of as a kind of private diary that has become public.
For this exhibition in a public open space, Véronique Ellena selected twenty-three images from her series Daily Life: Sundays, Life’s Great Moments, The Most Beautiful Age, Supermarkets, as representations of the mythologies of daily life, enriched by values of permanence, eternity or simply temporal immobility. Very much inspired by her own history and with a glance at Mythologies by Roland Barthes, she depicts with very great care the small things of life, the pleasure and the joy that they provide.
Véronique Ellena is a patient observer. Her photographs translate her obsession with bringing reality a little closer. The details chosen for their obviousness, everyday objects, still-lifes, clothes, fragments of the body, landscapes. Modest antidotes to an overdose of an often aggressive, contemporary world.
With her photographs Véronique Ellena has the talent to bring to life the noises of childhood, Sundays, important dates in life, and to keep them alive. She stages them in the style of contemporary vanity, drawing on a tradition form Dutch painting of the eighteenth century. The power of her images is in what she doesn’t photograph, people, objects, places and moments but from the relationships between living beings, objects, places and time.
Véronique Ellena, La vie quotidienne
10th February to 22nd April 2018
Hôtel Départemental des Arts – Centre d’art du Var
236 Boulevard Général Leclerc
83000 Toulon
France
https://www.var.fr/culture/hotel-des-arts
