Petits drames — Da-End Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 7 → December 19, 2015

The Galerie Da-End is pleased to present Little dramas, a selection of artworks by eight international photographers and video artists who stage and dramatize their subjects.

After a documented preparation work, these artists produce artworks that are theatrical scenes in themselves, or that tell us a story, at the frontier of tableau vivant. These sometimes dark or humoristic, real or oneiric sequences show a particular attention drawn to banal as well as dramatic situations. News in brief, domestic accidents, psychological tension, sentimental dilemma are some of the elements that come perturbate the apparent calmness of everyday life.

Takeshi Sumi, Two face / Slit*1, 2015 Mixed media (photographic print, slit) — 33 × 48 cm Courtesy de l’artiste et la Galerie Da-End

By making the familiar or even the real world dysfunction, the artists divert their medium for narrative, and often illusionnist, ends. From the daily to the universal, their artworks soak us up into an active contemplation in which the thread of intimate stories unwinds. These staged scenes denote the artists’ great perspicacity to scrutinize and analyze reality, that they don’t wish to translate in a litteral or truthful way, but on the contrary through the distirting prism of their imagination.

This reflexion on the theatrical representation of reality comes along a questioning of the very photographic or filmic medium. At the border of video art and photography, the works of Benjamin Renoux for instance, presented in the shape of tondi, engage in a dialogue between tradition and technology. A will to mutate photographs into an autonomous and polysemous object comes up in his approach ; will that can also be found in the interactive and three-dimensional creations of Colombian artist Nieto.

Benjamin Renoux, Amphora #1, 2015 Vidéo numérique (27 minutes), vidéo projecteur, toile de rétro-projection, plâtre, résine, pigments, bois, acrylique — 86 × 37 × 37 cm Courtesy de l’artiste et la Galerie Da-End

Japenese artists Satoshi Saïkusa, Ken Kitano and Takeshi Sumi as for them, double up their photographic work with plastic interventions on the prints, that they cut in the shape of dots later re-assembled into entomological boxes. Through this composition works, they underline the furtive and evanescent character of human life.

In Daido Moriyama’s work, the spontaneity of the photographer seeking for the «decisive moment» is replaced, in his series of erotic photos, by a cautious reconstitution of shady scenes. The sulfurous perfume that radiates from them is not dissimilar to the ambiance of films noirs in which femmes fatales wander at night in urban sceneries.

Daido Moriyama, Sans titre, 2012 Gelatin silver print — 43 × 36 cm Courtesy de l’artiste et la Galerie Da-End

More clinical, the photographic work of Shunsuke François Nanjo disrupts our perception of time and space. The white miniature characters on white background that he stages seem to narrate the universal memories of happy familial and interpersonal interactions. Finally, Guillaume Delaperrière will take us to an audio and visual journey thanks to his new creation staging everyday artifacts.