Ni d’ici ni d’ailleurs — Un jardin en hiver — LWS Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 10 → February 16, 2013

This double exhibition is built around Isabelle Taourel’s and Sergei Isakov’s recent works. Under the generic title Ni d’ici ni d’ailleurs, Isabelle Taourel follows the line of paysage de l’exil, with exil zinc, anthropos, par-être and comment dire series.

With Un jardin en hiver, Sergei Isakov sharpens and strengthens his personal and timeless vision of the white landscape.

In 2011, Sergei Isakov has invited Isabelle Taourel to share the white theme, which led Martine Lerude to say:

“was there any talk between the photographer and the painter? Or is this a fiction aroused by the meeting of a same radical nature in each other’s work?”

Free as a Storm

Isabelle Taourel set off again on exile roads…

First of all, vastness, sky and sea are mixed up. Horizon of nowhere, grey on grey. Where to go, unless going straight ahead, over there, towards a continuously unattainable freedom? On makeshift boats, dented airplanes, here they are, those men who left everything behind for promise lands. our fellows, our brothers. We look so much the same!

“I am not only me”, said Isabelle Taourel at that moment, in order to mark the occasion. Sceptical, she added: “why do we look at others as foreigners? Why isn’t there any bit of ourselves saying we are foreigners too?”

Here they are and they introduce themselves. Pictures of nonidentity. Total eclipse of faces. Who are these men about whom nothing is know, about whom we don’t want to know anything? Four shots for a shadow, and then they’re gone.

 — Identity papers? — No…

 — Get lost!

Black of photo-booths. Unknown foreigners. Denial to see. Denial to understand.

“I am not only me”. Isabelle Taourel irradiates blacks, any black of the world, in a multitude of hues. “Who else than me would say the other?”

Again, the sea, on small zinc plates. Shroud of white waves. Foam of nights, in an exile night-time. Songs of Maldoror: “ancient ocean, you are the symbol of identity…” and then, later on: “As free as a storm, it beached, one day, on indomitable beaches of its dreadful will. it fears nothing, unless itself!” Suddenly, the man appears. Once, twice, thrice. Black at first. Before getting dressed. Hidden and buried face, for fear of being recognised, clothes are alive. No need to say who you are, clothes speak for yourself. Festive costumes, colours, life is back. Hope… one day though we’ll have to leave. Go back to the desert, either willingly or by force, see the stones again, find the last disseminated traces of life on the ground. Mankind is not only itself. Again, Lautréamont: “Mankind and i, shutting away in limits of our intelligence (…), we move away, with hate trembling, by taking two opposite ways, as if we wounded each other with the tip of a dagger (…), myself, alone against humanity.”

Like a rolling stone…

Cross deserts, huge and ravaged plains. High winds are coming, at other shores. On the other side of the sea. Change of point of view. Our story is theirs; their story is ours. Question of otherness. And if we were looking at these men coming to us?

— Franck Nouchi

Blanc et Blanc

Isabelle taourel’s painting seems to answer the dry and infinite white, which ends the series of Serge Isakov’s photographies, thanks to the thickness and movement of a white occupied by light; moving and evasive light, though hitting us, and taking us in its own game.

White of which waves arouse a series of momentary, anachronistic and secret images.

Often intimate, a white opening the memory. 

— I am filled with the memory of this radical winter light, which whitened the frozen lakes of Berlin and brought to light the unexpected violence of a shining white with thousands of colors.

Living white of its internal movement, from light and expectations its creates: an immaterial joy coming from far away, from every painting seen and forgotten, and from those of which image remains precise, intact.

Founding white carrying all the history of painting.

Old melody of a child song or lyrical abstraction promising the coming colour.

Martine Lerude

Isabelle Taourel was born in 1960. After university, she learnt patina and wall fresco techniques. Since 1995, Isabelle Taourel has been dedicating herself to painting and engraving. Her “Paysage de l’exil” series was exhibited at LWS gallery in 2010.

For his second exhibition at LWS gallery, this collection of works entitled Un jardin en hiver represents for Sergei Isakov “an attempt to move even further away from the concrete and fixed daily reality, to approach what represents the essence and spontaneity of existence”.

By observing and paying attention to minimal movements and insignificant topics, the photograph catches what seems to be ordinary which, for an instant, through a light, angle or fate, highlights the unreal dimension suitable to bring a feeling back to life or a buried, forgotten or dreamed memory. in an ancestral language, almost poetic, the reactivation of sensible stamps opens the door to proust’s spell of recollection, to an enchanted and dreamlike universe, an imaginary garden. aware that intimate reality only discloses when the unexpected suddenly appears in the usual, the regular, Sergei Isakov is not trying to impress the viewer by force of a topic. He gets rid of arguments and illustrations, although applicable to photography, to seek for buried feelings in what we can analyse: the charm of an embankment in the mist, the last breath of a house just before it goes down. messengers of premonitions, apparitions and evocations, images create “worlds” of fictions and imagination and draw a new sensible plate between the eye and the soul. This searching for another reality level may remind the approach of movie director Andrei Tarkovsky, essential inspiration for the artist, who was making himself the sets of his movies so that they best suited his vision.

Sergei Isakov’s desire to capture spontaneity and to pass it on without any trace of human intervention determines his technical and creative choices. He only uses his view camera (8×10 inches) with natural light. He favours an intense reflection leading to a precise work of shooting and makes the decisive choice of a contact print, a printing technique of direct contact between the film and the photosensitive paper, without an enlarger. You must see the structure erasing for the benefit of sensitivity, he says, and building the pace inside the composition, on contrasts of blacks and whites, which let appear the development of a life inside the image.

Sergei isakov was born in 1974 in the Urals, Western Siberia. He is one of the leading figures in russian photography. Influenced by sober constructive forms freed from any remarks, his work is anchored in the silence and the evocative power of the image.

In january 2010, an exhibition in Paris introduced photographs from his “les routes blanches” series. In june 2011, his first personal exhibition in France, “Vorkouta, nuit polaire”, gathered fascinating views of a ghostly city where lines, forms and lights redesigned its history, in a biased reality.