The press kit is absolutely kitsch but the images are amazing, so here is the exhibition!
Dampierre-sur-Boutonne castle has welcomed many kings in its history, including Francis I and Louis XIII, accompanied by their entourage as was the use when the king of France travelled. Today, it is a very different areopagus that came to the august home. Through the vision of Sanges, it is not the courtiers, chamberlains and squires of the king whose ghosts are spread on the walls but other apparitions just as mysterious. Here, a woman holding an umbrella rides a fish in the dark, there another muse gloved but with very few clothes on, seems to be dialoguing with a huge insect; further, strange shells wander between shadow and light and sail around an indefinable form, while elsewhere a face smiles through the wing of a butterfly, or a dragonfly, among corals at the foot of which enormous eggs are enthroned, keeping the threshold of an inaccessible nest.
The artist has named this series wunderkamera, which means miraculous camera, because it is that of the “darkroom”. From the obscurity of the photographic process, Sanges gives birth to a luminous universe. Not the light of nature, all solar, but the clarity of the mind that imagines and reveals the stratifications of dreams and the unconscious.
Formed by an uncle photographer, “impressed” from adolescence by the cinema of the beginnings and by the surrealist movement, he kept from this visual and cerebral route the attraction for the invisible and the taste for dreamlike images. Superimpositions, constructions and collages, associations of worlds glimpse at and half-erased memories are the core material of Sanges’ creation, or rather its immaterial. But unlike most of the surrealists, he displays neither ideology nor provocative hostility. The poetry of chance and the love of signs, which suggest as much as they mislead, reigns in this world of the hereafter whose atmosphere recalls certain spiritist photographs from the end of the 19th century. But the great figures of the cinema cross also this inner journey: the Nosferatu and the Faust of Murnau, the Vampire of Dreyer or the Fall of the House of Usher of Edgar Allan Poe in Jean Epstein movie seem to hover over these photographs, as much as nostalgic look at the past as it is filled with fantasy.
Wunderkamera by Sanges
from September 28th to November 11th
Château de Dampierre
17470 Dampierre on Boutonne
