[Winter 2019]
From the manipulation of light (through filtering, combination, or diffraction) to work on the supporting medium (film, photographic paper, walls) to searching out pictorial compositions on city streets, a space of exploration opens up for photography around the various manifestations of colour. The result is images that challenge our perceptions. Often, the referent for these works is abstract painting, with its long tradition of experimentation, but the real also bears its share of perceptual ambiguity with regard to the impact of colours.
YANN POCREAU
Les surfaces de lumière
Light has always been central to Yann Pocreau’s work, at first serving as the setting for a corporeal presence anchored to the essential lines of a space. Later, bodies were gradually supplanted by light – and its materiality –alone. Pocreau did this first in projections of white and various colour filters, and he then turned to surfaces and processes for reception and transcription of colour (the chemistry and materiality of papers, filters, and films, colour charts, diffractions), leading to his current research in relation to pictorial abstraction.
With an essay by Bénédicte Ramade
JESSICA EATON
Iterations (I)
Jessica Eaton presents the first part of a series resulting from two years of intensive experimentation in the studio. This series continues her unique approach to production of abstract photographic images made entirely in camera, through multiple exposures and direct – and blind – captures of manipulations of grey-painted objects and the use of coloured filters. Iterations (I) offers a series of complex optical variations based on the systematic permutation of elements and colours that build a set of deepening frames against a gradually dimming background or, on the contrary, play on variations of perceptual pre-eminence of the foreground against the background and the horizontal surface.
With an essay by Stephen Horne
BERT DANCKAERT
True Nature
Colour is also very present in Bert Danckaert’s work, which is produced not through experimentation with light, but through perceptual data drawn from an existing reality that Danckaert throws into relief to expose its inherent composition. He frames these scenes from urban environments almost as if they were abstract paintings, emphasizing a geometry of coloured planes from which elements of the urban landscape emerge. These images often denote a slightly derisory attempt to re-create nature as artificial within an inimical, often unkempt environment – an utter departure from the flashy, stylish monuments associated with the identity of cities.
With an essay by James D. Campbell