PIERS RAWSON:
PHOTOGRAPHIES
Surreal?
Voiture
Oradour
ART
Four sets of prints look at ways
photography relies on perception, realism, cultural reference and time. Surreal?,
Voiture, and Oradour all include photographs from France (with
brief excursions to Italy and Brussels); ART montages images from
disparate sources in a play on our notions of the meaning of art.
Surreal? explores different ideas of surrealism
in photography: from direct reference to the Surrealist movement in France, to
a sense of the dreamlike, poetic, ambiguous and irrational – conveyed in a nuance
of light or enigmatic absence – implying an unfulfilled narrative that only we
can complete.The Miro sculpture is at the Fondation Maeght (St-Paul de Vence);
five images were made in the village of Seillans, beloved of the Surrealists
and home to Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst 1957-76.
Voiture makes a transition between Surreal?
and Oradour, a brief take on entropy and the automobile as cultural
fetish.
Oradour: Day for Night presents a personal
response to the tragedy of Oradour-sur-Glâne: on 10 June, 1944 this village in
the Limousin, France, was attacked without warning, and on grounds still far
from clear, by a regiment of the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer division. Buildings were
gutted by fire and 642 citizens (women, men and children) were massacred. In
the ruins, only the solid traces of a society survived – iron bedsteads, sewing
machines, tramlines and cars.The “martyred village” is a national monument
committed to preserving the site as a lasting memorial (a battle against rust
and the forgetfulness of time passing); paradoxically, it manages to offer both
a visitor attraction and an intensely moving encounter with small-town life
frozen in time. I came to see the vehicles, crushed by falling masonry, as an
equivalent to Paul Nash’s Totes Meer (1940- 1): a lunar displacement
from the everyday, like the cinema practice of shooting “day for night”.
ART is a new series deriving from a public
art billboard commission of 2004: fully intended to seduce the eye – but who
says “frivolous” can’t also be “serious”? Imagine an intimate rendezvous
between Grayson Perry and Andy Warhol, then spend some time trying to get the
image out of your head.... Note the irony, the veiled references to
Romanticism! To access this aspect, the titles are significant: Landscape; Skyscape;
Art in a Painted Sky (#1 and #2, n.b. a glorious sunset is sometimes
referred to as a “painted sky”; the actual painted sky comes from Palladio’s
Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza); The Art of Camouflage.
All prints (unless
stated): archival pigment inks on archival paper, signed, edition of 10.
© Piers Rawson www.scenae.co.uk
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