Marie Bovo
08 September - 08 October 2011
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| © Marie Bovo
Grisaille 217, 2010.
Tirage ilfochrome, 130 x 165 cm.
Courtesy the artist and kamel mennour, Paris. |
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MARIE BOVO
Grisailles
8 September - 8 October 2011
Kamel Mennour is pleased to present "Grisailles”, Marie Bovo’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.
Marie Bovo has been photographing the strange luminosity of night for a
long time: neon lights, in Japan and elsewhere, whose multi-coloured
glare burns and pierces the darkness, but also the pale glimmer of the
moon and the stars. Humans are absent from these images, as if driven
out of this paradise of Mediterranean beaches where the artist installed
her camera. The open shutter stretches time, makes several
temporalities coexist – that of the human city, which remains out of
shot but whose electric lights we guess at; and more mythological ones,
of nature, the sea, the sky and the earth. Marie Bovo’s photographs play
with the inbetween, duality and paradox. Profoundly rooted in reality,
sometimes bringing geopolitical or social implications into play, each
of her creations bears witness to a dual view of things, which turns a
straightforward and specific situation into the expression of a
universal dimension, where the past catches up with the present, where
different cultures, in particular those of the Mediterranean world, are
brought together.
For her exhibition at galerie kamel mennour, the artist has chosen to
present two recent series of works: Cours intérieures (60, rue Mazarine)
and Grisailles (47, rue Saint André des Arts), which together mark a
turning-point in her work resulting from an increased prominence given
to architecture.
The Cours intérieures (2008-2009), photographed by Marie Bovo in a
workingclass area of arseille, are intermediary spaces, intercessors
between the city, the street and the house. The camera lens is pointed
upwards, following the vertical line of these "wells” where the light
barely penetrates and where the long exposure captures the sky unfurling
above in the form of an immaculate rectangle.
Photographed at different hours of the day and in different seasons, the
patch of sky, the washing-lines and the laundry allow the architecture
to be read in numerous different ways, at the same time as seeming to be
a symbol of the life that inhabits these places. If there is something
of the cathedral and a feeling of elevation in these images, where the
laundry hanging from the lines seems like a multitude of baroque angels,
it is that these were once opulent dwellings, now poor, for which the
artist evokes "a form of Pasolini-esque resistance to bourgeois space”.
The reference to old master painting is revealed in the title of
Grisailles (2010), a series created in the hallways leading to the
courtyards of the very same apartment buildings. This series has been
photographed using a very similar set of camera angles – here too, the
camera is tilted upwards – but the topographical markers are missing.
The subject this time is flaking ceilings, a lunar landscape of damaged
mouldings that still carry the traces of gray paint that was meant to
imitate stone, and which bears witness to the history of these places.
It is this multi-layering of colours and uses that Marie Bovo
scrutinises, where architecture becomes the background to this strange
colour, grey – "the colour of ageing, of loss, of disintegration, it
belongs to the realm of holes, gaps, the negative…” From then on, we
find ourselves faced with a study of the variations of light and colour,
their changing meteorology: "their architecture remains important but
like a negative geometry, a void that turns our sense of perspective and
presence upside down and defies all conceptualisation.”*
* Régis Durand, "Marie Bovo, l’historicité du quotidien” [Marie Bovo,
the historicity of the everyday], artpress 373, December 2010.
Born in Alicante in 1967, Marie Bovo lives and works in Marseille.
Her work has recently been shown at the Palazzo Zenobio as part of the 54th
Venice Biennale, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the
Centre de Création Contemporaine in Tours, Luìs Serpa Projectos in
Lisbon, the Collections de Saint-Cyprien, the Maison de la Photographie
in Toulon, the City of Marseille Ateliers, the [mac] Musée d’Art
Contemporain in Marseille, the Caszuidas Screen in Amsterdam and the
Federation Square in Melbourne.
www.galeriemennour.com
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