Xavier d’Ornellas : Récoltes Composées

Arles and its celebrated Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie are set to open in three weeks’ time. Like every year, a few days beforehand, I stick my nose out and prick up my ears to get a sense of the local atmosphere and gauge the importance that will be given to this new vintage.

On my rounds, I invariably walk past the galerie vOx, which has the great merit of being open frequently outside the festival calendar. It regularly alternates between established photographers and emerging creators, whose common distinction is knowing how to make a photograph which is, unfortunately, no longer the general rule.

The gallery is currently presenting work by Xavier d’Ornellas whose innovative mastery of chance is particularly sensual and poetic. The likelihood of obtaining these images which strive to seduce whoever cares to rest an eye upon them was extremely remote.

The artist spent several decades travelling the world, a Leica and notebooks in his satchel. Too busy to write, he would slip flowers and leaves between the pages of his notebooks as memos, then forget them in a corner until the end of his working life. By pure clumsiness, the notebooks, retrieved and piled on his desk, tumbled to the floor, releasing their contents in total disorder all over the ground. This was only the beginning of a story of successive improbabilities which would yield, under the photographer’s constant mastery, a body of images in complete deference to the unpredictable workings of light.

In a word, this is the very opposite of those cookbook recipes for the production of those dreadful photographic imitations that dull our understanding, dragging us along lost photographic trails.

In Xavier’s works, are caresses of light  with all their uncertainty that carry us beyond the everyday.

Thierry Maindrault

EXHIBITION
Galerie vOx
68 rue du 4 septembre
13200 Arles
Open or by appointment: +33 6 10 86 10 36
[email protected]