Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

The theme of landscapes is often observed from an angle of contemplation and vertiginous experiences. It is an outstandingly romantic subject. Landscapes, whether urban or rural, are a playground, an area of astonishment and wander, as well as of loss and suffocation. Venturing into such territory often means facing a strong aesthetic dimension. But landscapes must be viewed primarily as a system, a perfect theorem of time and space, of flows and crossroads, of boundaries and crossings.  However, if one accepts to be “in conflict” with them, whether as a vision or a production of space, and despite their apparent obviousness, they may be put into perspective and thus reinvented. The visual experience of Vice City  and Removed Landscapes by Thibault Brunet and Marina Gadonneix respectively, is ambiguous. They weave, with a thread of floating absurdity and metaphorical irony, a certain contradiction between presence and absence. Their photographs play with a distorted and complex link between radical documentaries and fantastical fiction.  Here, the real world slips from obviousness to abstraction, from fullness to emptiness, from mockery to simulation and vice-versa. What Thibault Brunet offers the viewer is the fruit of equations and computer programming; his landscapes bathe in an inexpressible fog and time seems to have no effect on them as they don’t exist. A search on Google Earth will generate no answers. These territories are purely imaginary stagings derived from video games. The artist thus invites us to contemplate an emptiness where he is both observer and scrutinizing photographer on the edge of frenzy and action. Marina Gadonneix’s work is also about off-sides and off-camera. Her images, in their bare form (monochrome neutral background without boundaries) are created on chroma keying sets for television and film. Her abysmal landscapes are remarkably minimalistic, a space of emptiness and a vast field of possibilities; they push contemplation to the limits of erasure, with no horizons lines seem to flee. These two series, in their own way, lead us to wonder about the mutations of photographical reality. Without forgetting the pictorial and literary angles, how can one not think of Turner, David Friedrich or even Rothko? These two photographers incorporate a dose of magic and fullness to representation, which ultimately affirms itself through construction, alteration and fiction. These ghostly, melancholic and strange territories contradict the trivialness and habits of our tourist eye. Rather than the immediate sight let us choose labyrinthine emptiness. Thibault Brunet (fr, 1982), Graduate of the Fine Arts School of Nîmes, France. Represented by Binôme gallery, Paris. www.thibaultbrunet.fr Marina Gadonneix (fr, Paris), Graduate of the National School of Photography, Arles. Represented by Kaune Suddendorf Gallery, Cologne>. www.marinagadonneix.com/ (translation Ramona Bourhis)