Marie Bovo — Sitio — MEP, Maison européenne de la photographie — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: December 15, 2010 → January 30, 2011

For a long time, Marie Bovo has photographed the strange lights of the night: Japanese neon signs that burn and glow in the darkness, and the pale light of the Moon and stars. Human beings are absent from these pictures, as if they have been driven out of this paradise of Mediterranean beaches where the artist has set up her view camera. Long exposures expand time and bring together several timeframes — the timeframe of the city of men which remains outside the frame but whose electric signs can be half-seen; and the more mythological timeframe of nature, the sea, the sky and and the earth. Marie Bovo’s pictures play with intermediacy, duality, and antinomy.

At the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the artist presents three recent series of photographs that have marked a turning point in her work thanks to their focus on architecture. In Bab-el-Louk (2006), she trains her lens on the houses in the lower reaches of Cairo, of which only the roof terraces are visible because of the closely packed buildings. She photographed the same view at different times of the day and night : the city is the same, and yet different each time. Baking in the sun at midday, it is reborn in the cool of the evening. “They’re not exactly outside, and yet they’re not private spaces in the house either. They are in-between spaces, intercessors between the various dimensions of the city”.

Cours intérieures (2008) depict courtyards in a working class district of Marseille: once again these are intermediate spaces between the street and the house. But this time the camera is pointed vertically upwards in tiny light-wells; long exposure times capture the sky above as an immaculate rectangle. There is something cathedral-like, something that lifts the spirit, in these images, and the washing hanging on the line reminds us of baroque angels.

A reference to historic paintings can also be seen in the title of Grisailles (2010), which follows a similar principle applied to the entranceways to residential buildings. Here, peeling ceilings like lunar landscapes and damaged mouldings reflect the history of the building: once wealthy, now poor human habitats in which the artist discerns “a form of Pasolinian resistance to the bourgeois living space”.