Jean-Luc Moulène — Fénautrigues — Chantal Crousel Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 26 → June 16, 2012

Jean-Luc Moulène’s latest exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel offers a selection of photographs of the landscapes of Fénautrigues, a small village in the department of Lot and the cradle of the artist’s family. During fifteen years between 1991 and 2006, as seasons went by, Jean-Luc Moulène paced up and down the tracks of this small territory of 5 km2. Gardens, brooks, woods, country roads, as well as field labour and everyday life, provided for more than 7000 shots. From this archival undertaking, Jean-Luc Moulène has extracted some fifteen photographs, which constitute an aesthetic and analytical inventory of the landscape.

The main room presents eleven large photographs establishing a physical relation to the images in the space. Hung in a precise order, these works invite the visitor to follow the artist in a stroll between heaven and earth. In the second room, smaller photographs are exhibited, as pictures with revealing details. They give us here reading and understanding tools; they become guides amidst these landscapes.

500 images extracted from this work on the local memory of Fénautrigues were gathered in the book «Fénautrigues, trois chemins au ruisseau, vers le haut, en bas» published in 2010. The book was a public comission* of the Ministry of Culture and Communication — Centre National des Arts Plastiques.

Two copies of this publication are on display in the exhibition. A directory of images and forms, they offer a different presentation and apprehension of the pictures, in dialogue with the physical photographs in the exhibition space.

Jean-Luc Moulène’s book, designed by Marc Touitou, is published by the Editions de la Table Ronde and the CNAP. It features an insert by the writer Thierry Guichard. 1500 copies are distributed in bookshops at a price made affordable to a large audience thanks to the support of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques. Additional 500 copies have been offered to a number of institutions (art centres, regional contemporary art funds, art schools and museums of contemporary art, as well as regional directorates of cultural affairs), in particular in Midi-Pyrénées, the region of Fénautrigues.