AINSI VA LA LUMIERE. Simone Simon and Joseph Dadoune Exhibition from 15 February to 22 March 2014 Simone Simon , Joseph Dadoune, guest artist.
AINSI VA LA LUMIERE. Simone Simon and Joseph Dadoune Exhibition from 15 February to 22 March 2014 Simone Simon , Joseph Dadoune, guest artist. Set design by Florent Testa, artist and set designer. florent.testa@gmail.com Simone Simon The disappearance of the figure Simone Simon began her career in 1978 as a fashion photographer. She worked for the press, catalogues and advertising, and produced many campaigns for prestigious brands. From 2002 on, she embarks on personal research centred on memory and identity, until she definitively abandons her career as a fashion photographer in 2004. This change of course bears witness to a body of work on the disappearance of the figure, a move from superficial appearance to the depth of the human mind. It is interesting to note that, from her very first personal photographic series, Simone Simon makes the omnipresent models disappear in favour of anonymous figures « Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers…» at the Dojo in Nice, 2002: this is the beginning of the disappearance of the figure. Human forms are still there, but they are reduced to silhouettes drowned in a uniform setting. Although the figures are isolated, they cannot be recognised. This partial disappearance of the figure becomes radical with the urban photographs: she photographs either disused places where not a soul is left (Charleroi), Exhibition Villa Cameline 2011, or inhabited places in deprived neighbourhoods, « Les portes du Saint-Pierre » at the Ariane in Nice, 2009 (published by Le passager clandestin). Ainsi va la lumière No man in the landscape, yet human presence is visible everywhere. The countries crossed are far from one another, yet all the photographs speak of the same thing, absence and abandonment: in Andalusia, the modern ruins of unfinished, uninhabited buildings, an abandoned golf course overgrown with weeds and draped in tattered sheets; in Latvia, a squalid supermarket, a paved street where garden gnomes contrast with the anarchist graffiti on an old fence; in the Camargue, a deserted leisure park. Yet all these photographs reflect an emptiness transcended by the aesthetics of composition and light, which gives them their ambiguous poetry. The exhibition is an opportunity to present the artist’s latest work, which blends photography and video in an intimate, fused way. An intrusion into the image, a journey through time, the wind, the shifting light: the image comes to life. The superimposition of image and video unsettles the viewer and disturbs their bearings; they are caught up in the subtle, hypnotic movement that brings the still image to life. Marie Nicola Curatorial assistant at the Matisse Museum, Nice Photography does not necessarily tell us what is no longer, but only and with certainty what has been. Roland Barthes, La chambre claire, 1980. Joseph Dadoune Simone Simon’s guest is Joseph Dadoune, a Franco-Israeli artist. Their approaches are linked by minimalism and by a questioning of identity.…
