Opening on Wednesday, December 11 from 6pm
Exhibition open from December 12 to 15, 2019 and during the Christmas vacations
and by appointment until January 11, 2020
Angélique Lecaille's monumental drawings invite us to contemplate landscapes on the edge of the world. Nebulous skies pierced by light, rocky mountains with sharp edges, the absence of human figures and vertiginous perspectives; in her work, the grandiose rubs shoulders with the phantasmagorical.
"Sucked into a rocky rift, drawn into an abstract clearing, carried away by a cloudy broth, let's not miss the first vertigo these drawings provoke, at the risk of underestimating their critical significance: this trouble is that of anachronism. In the antechamber to the aesthetic experience promised by the virtuosity of large-format graphite work, shouldn't we consider the technique, the subject, the references and perhaps this mood as so many means borrowed from the past to re-interrogate the medium's relevance? Angélique Lecaille puts drawing to the test of the present - until the paper and the hand are exhausted. [...] Angélique Lecaille's rocky visions are part of the Romantic landscape as advocated by Caspar David Friedrich, who demanded that the painter represent "not only what he sees in front of him, but also what he sees in himself" (1).
Jean-Claude Pondevie's photographic work reflects a quest for purity and composition, based on landscapes and architectures with no reference to place or time. With his cinematically framed exterior views, he is interested in the "off-field", the space in which our reality is inscribed without documenting it. Architecture is reduced to abstract forms, on which the play of light and shadow and the effects of transparency create a sensation of unreality.
After careful observation, his black monochromes reveal abandoned interiors, urban wastelands and desert landscapes. More recently, Jean-Claude Pondevie has been incorporating evanescent architectures into his images, purely imaginary creations that lend these photographs a fictional dimension.
"Black retains from reality only its pure luminous essence, "this treasure of rays" which Barthes said continued to reach us after the disappearance of the being or thing photographed. (...) The image takes on the thickness of time and place, but at the same time projects another universe. A floating dream..."
Jean Claude Pondevie
A conversation develops between these two singular works, as the photographic work and the drawing plunge us into a mental landscape, a waking dream to which "Le temps suspendu" invites us.
(1) Excerpts from Julie Portier's text "Le dernier Dessin" for DDAB.org. Documents d'Artistes Bretagne publishes online dossiers produced with visual artists living in Brittany, 2015.
Angélique Lecaille and Jean-Claude Pondevie - Le temps suspendu
Melanie Rio Fluency - 3 place Albert Camus, 44200 Nantes
Exhibition open from December 12 to 15 during normal opening hours, then by appointment until January 11, 2020.
Open Thursday and Friday 1pm > 7pm, Saturday and Sunday 3pm > 7pm
