I will finish this blogging week by the precious works of Liz Deschenes. Her approach of photography is to me one of the most interesting on the question to what an image is. In french we don't make any specific difference with the word image. In english, the word image is the objet of a visual impression, picture is an artefact. In those works, I could talk about pictures that hide images, and images that dissolve themselves at the surface of pictures. This interest for the dissolution, for the expression of gradual disappearance of the representation takes diverses forms. Beyond a representation, beyond the need of the creation of a ressembance to mitigate the absence. But if image is originally a masque, what is it hiding today? (more…)

Chris Engman is working with time and spatial perception, and how meaning is constructed and understood against the fluid dynamics of abstraction and representation. Nevertheless notions vaster than our nevertheless permanant report in the visible leads Chris Engman's works as he inexplicable fact of our existence, the ungraspable experience of time, and the illusive and unknowable nature of reality, struggle, failure, death, illusion, and disillusionment. His work calls attention to our misperceptions - the gulf that exists between how we see and how we think, and how we think we see and think we think - and the inconstant and constructed nature of memory. Engman's photographs aim to speak to the passage of time closer to how it is actually experienced. The photographs are documentations of sculptures and installations as well as records of actions and elaborate processes. In the desert, he affixes strange and complex artefacts, installs frames, as to try to confine these infinite and wild spaces. The set up structures are demanding and require of the artist several days of location, assembly to begin finally the marriage with their natural environment. The trajectory of the sun, its incidence on the relief of these architectures are attentively studied. The infrastructure never aims at the ostentation and succeeds even in leading to forget its learned elaboration; the image, light as the obvious fact stays only. Created in close collaboration with the movements of the sun, the artist erects surrealist-like structures at specific sites using basic materials and earth. Engman works with undeveloped land, ocean views and deserts in creating structures and configurations that not only sit within an environment but disguise or contort our reading of it. His photographs are laboured, and they don’t take short cuts. In that sense Chris Engman works like a sculptor or installation artist who uses photography as a tool. (more…)

Today I will present Pablo Julian Mendez's works. The common bottom of Pablo's works articulate around researches on the subjects of the perception, the language, rites and poetry as well in a photographic way than in videos. Holism is a body of photographs that plays with the photographic 'structure' in itself. Pablo plays with the composants as colors, surface and pixels. Before any manipulation, all the taken photos are in color. Pablo takes back the dominating color in the image, extrapolate it, and makes it an image in itself. The particle which is a part of the image become a new surface. As the line, the point do not exist in the digital photography, but pixels. 'Holism' is the idea that natural systems (physical, biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, linguistic, etc.) and their properties should be viewed as wholes, not as collections of parts. This often includes the view that systems function as wholes and that their functioning cannot be fully understood solely in terms of their component parts. I think it's a nice parralele to photography. To how by a gesture, a look can be deconstructed. In the proposal Pablo Méndez's holism there are two parts: images-color and images-forms, among which the one makes knowledge another one. The project plays with "veiled" images in which what remains recognizable it is a shape, sometimes more likely to the "real world" and in others quite more "abstract". That invites to the spectators to restore the articulation between the image-color and the image-shape. A presence of an abscence. As well as see every part separately and be allowed carry by the poetry of colors or the forms, in a space of an unambiguous non-meaning, and opening in the experience. Language and perception are a strong base in Pablo's concerns. I invite you to have a look on his videographic laboratory. www.mendezpablo.com.ar

I am happy to present today Taiyo Onorato's and Nico Krebs's works. "Raise the bar" is a smart reconsideration of some of the visual lessons of 1970s Photoconceptualism. It’s a welcome reminder that understanding how a camera sees can lead to playful illusion making and clever optical trickery. They have created a short series around architecture, proportions, emptiness and anachronic references to socialist iconography. The «Building Berlin/Constructions» series was photographed in Berlin’s empty lots between 2009 and 2012 on 8x10 Inch Negative Material. It pares down the politics, and economics, and social issues that surround such developments, peeling all of those layers back to reveal elemental forms. They activate substance "readymade" of an object or a body placed in front of the camera or lens. Typical of their oeuvre is the interplay with the two-dimensional character of photography as much at least as they lead an experiment of the reality. They carefully construct their photos as sculptors do, moulding them and they create a complete universe in which object and representation clash with each other. I like this round trip enter photographic and sculptural, this fold on which the photography takes place. I like this sculptural way of photographing, of turning around the object, to fix a point, to put it on the surface. I like this way those materials, and the manipulations form here, then are later transformed. I like this impermanence. Have a look at their website! www.tonk.ch

It is difficult to me to find first words to introduce photographers, as its prism is quite diffuse. In front of an obvious multitude of approaches and appreciations quite so subjective the some that the others, I shall concentrate my words on artists among who question the photographic medium beyond its surface, sometimes beyond the things represented in the image. Artists who are also interested in the process by which an image appears as well as protocols of their implementation. I shall speak in these cases of intentionality, gestures, and experiments. I am eager to show for one part the work of artists for whom  photography is a process which returns in echo with other mediums, sometimes as documents, some other times as a demolition of the medium it self. (more…)