MARBLE MIRRORS
Stone faces
Scattered blocks or stone sheets laid down intentionally or left as they are by irony of time, is not prevailing here: our concern is just and only what the eye and the matter can tell us, give us and show us in their utmost sensitivity to grasp and extract what from the real and photography contributes to the epiphany of a picture.
A picture that fascinates and disturbs while favouring the strict definition of the shapes and forms.
An epiphany of white and grey sides whose thin texture translates the extreme plasticity of the photographic medium. Indeed, here is this medium unveiled, accepted and chosen for its ability to reveal but also to ‘give‘.
Spaces of bright gifts, François Sagnes’ photographs waver in this fictional tension in which the mineral is freed from its gravity, in which what was direct cutting in the block becomes a landscape of photographic whites.
The photographer takes what his eye has been able to capture and then allows what his sensitivity will have been willing to retain. He does not capture anything. At best, he stops in front of what is already here, prior to his presence but thus set by chance and already wrought by time.
Squared off, left bare, or abraded, Carrara’s marble is but bright density. From block it becomes slabs because its very matter seems so much to create this transmutation from the whites to veined transparency. Hence this impression of lightness that both disturbs and fascinates us while the frontal shot reminds us of their weight mass.
Laid down on the ground in a masterly way, these purely geometrically-shaped stele come off from their original quarry to offer themselves like icons deprived of figures yet genuine stone faces. Where the eye carried us away toward an inaccessible representation, the eyes touch reverses this square and this triangle into genuine faces of ‘mineral flesh‘. No wonder that we can cast on them the remembrance of Rothko’s bright monochromes or of the pictorial flesh of Chardin’s ‘Ray‘.
As a matter of fact, it does not deal here so much with form as with this radiant strength whose initiating power photography has the privilege to unveil. It is thus the ‘acting‘ white that works with the laws of appearance to invent bright fictions where only sculptural narrations could have loomed up. The whites of the stone are transformed into a transparency of the matter to let us be reflected by these silvering marble mirrors.
Michelle Debat
Février 2001
Texte publié dans : Miroirs de marbre – faces de pierre ; éditions galerie Pennings, Eindhoven, 2001; porte-folios réalisé à 12 exemplaires comprenant sous emboîtage 30cm x 40cm deux tirages originaux .
Michelle Debat est enseignante à l’université de Paris 8 en photographie et critique.