The CPIF challenges our perceptions

Pontault-Combault (Seine-et-Marne). The title “Liquid Transparencies”, given to the exhibition, does not necessarily go without saying. However, its words and the selected works make it an event not to be missed. The idea of ​​bringing together photographs, sculptures and video installations which are slowly revealed only over the course of a longer apprehension than that which one has for images which one identifies immediately, brings together four artists with recent, even unpublished, work on the perception of great and beautiful depth. In a world saturated with images, and at a time when the question of the materiality of photography is in vogue in the field of contemporary art, the selection of Anne-Camille Allueva, Matan Mittwoch, Laure Tiberghien and Emmanuel Van der Auwera, forms a quartet of artists, brought together for the first time, who think outside the box. This reduced number of artists, desired by the two curators, Francesco Biasi and Nathalie Giraudeau, makes it possible to bring together different pieces by the same artist and to provide the space necessary for their apprehension as well as their unveiling. Their perception differs depending on the intensity of the light, its movement in the exhibition space and in front of the work.

Memento 59 (Capitol Black) by Emmanuel Van der Auwera, placed at the introduction to the exhibition, asks us to take a little time to identify what little by little appears behind the large blue monochrome. Built from a photograph of the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, which circulated widely in the media and on the Internet, the piece by the Belgian artist (1982) encourages us to observe the scene that reveals itself. Printed on offset plates used for printing newspapers and damaged by the printing process used, the image of a threatening crowd brandishing the American flag gradually reveals its details. Perception at Emmanuel Van der Auwera is a political issue. The nature of images – and their manipulations – is at the heart of three other creations by the artist in the exhibition.

Change of register with Matan Mittwoch (1982) and his abstract images or diverted objects linked to cinema, photography or the observation of the cosmos, which probe the perceptions and the aesthetic and metaphorical possibilities generated by the use of technological tools. His works produced as part of his residency last year at the Île-de-France Photographic Center (CPIF), or older, play on the parabola or the illusion, such as his two telephoto lenses with lenses placed end to end or this immense photograph with graphic design and seductive burst of light, born from a simple shooting of a point of light from a cardboard tube. Light, the condition for creating any image, proves to be as much a source of magic, of wonder as of deception. A work of art is an experience. The two sculptures by Anne-Camille Allueva (1984), constructed from light diffraction screens, also encourage us to perceive a moving image according to its movement, while the various luminographies of Laure Tiberghien (1992), abstract photographs, results of the interactions of light with the properties of the paper and the artist’s gestures when printing, connect to the emotional and contemplative power of color.