05.04.2023-07.15.2023
PHILIPPE GRONON
Rectos / Versos
Since the end of the 1980s, Philippe Gronon has been developing a photographic work whose starting point is the simplest definition of photography, namely that it is a technique for making images that records reality as it is. This observation is translated into a production protocol. Almost all of the objects photographed (amplifiers, safes, quotation tables, writing pads, lithographic stones, electric boards, versos of paintings, etc.) or more recently digitized, scanned (martyrs, stretchers and photographic tanks, stretcher-presses and the digitizing plate) are all in frontal view, at a scale of 1:1. Hijacked, they are isolated from any context or any spatio-temporal situation, which gives them a great and new formal intensity. Subjects as much as photographic objects, perfectly reproduced without being fetishes or artifacts, these motifs escape simple imagery. Their flatness and the way they are framed refer to the history of the painting, which gives each photo a pictorial character. On the other hand, their false frontal simplicity opens these images to the discovery of a world, that of the objects that surround us which acquire, here, an auratic dimension.
Verso n°38, Nymphéas, par Claude Monet, collection du musée d’art moderne de Saint Etienne, 2009
Photographie analogique couleur, épreuve numérique pigmentaire - 109 x 109 cm