SO GOES THE LIGHT

Simone Simon and Joseph Dadoune

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Exhibition from February 15 to March 22, 2014

Simone Simon, Joseph Dadoune guest artist

On a scenography of Florent Testa artist and scenographer.

Simone Simon

The disappearance of the figure

Simone Simon began her career in 1978 as a fashion photographer. She works for the press, catalogs, advertising and realizes numerous campaigns for prestigious brands.

Since 2002, she has been engaged in personal research, focusing on memory and identity, until she definitively abandoned her job as a fashion photographer in 2004. This change of course shows a work on the disappearance of the figure, a passage from the superficial appearance to the depth of the human spirit.

It is interesting to note that, from her first personal photographic series, Simone Simon makes the omnipresent models disappear in favor of anonymous people ” On the passage of some people through…” the Dojo in Nice 2002: it is the beginning of the disappearance of the figure.

The human forms are still there, but are limited to silhouettes drowned in a uniform decor. If the characters are isolated, we cannot recognize them.

This partial disappearance of the figure is radicalized with urban photos: she photographs either abandoned places where there is no longer a living soul (Charleroi), Villa Cameline exhibition 2011, or inhabited places but in disadvantaged neighborhoods “Les portes du Saint-Pierre” at the Ariane in Nice 2009 (editions Le passager clandestin).

Thus goes the light

No man in the landscape but the human presence is visible everywhere.

The countries I travelled through are far from each other, yet all the photographs speak of the same thing, absence, abandonment: in Andalusia, the modern ruins of unfinished and uninhabited buildings, a neglected golf course filled with wild grass and draped in tattered sails; in Latvia, a miserable supermarket, a cobbled street where garden gnomes contrast with the anarchist graffiti of an old fence, in the Camargue, a deserted leisure park.

However, all these photographs reflect an emptiness transcended by the aestheticism of the composition and the light, which gives them their ambiguous poetry.

The exhibition is an opportunity to present his latest work which mixes photography and video in an intimate and fusional way. An intrusion into the image, a journey through time, the wind, the changing light, the image comes alive.

The superimposition of the image and the video destabilizes the spectator and confuses his bearings, he is caught up in the subtle and hypnotic movement that gives life to the still image.

Marie Nicola

Assistant curator at the Matisse Museum in Nice

The photograph does not say (necessarily) what is no longer, but only and for sure, what was.

Roland Barthes, La chambre claire, 1980.

Joseph Dadoune

Simone Simon’s guest is Joseph Dadoune, Franco-Israeli artist.

Their approach is linked by minimalism and the questioning of identity.

Ultimate photography

Joseph Dadoune became known in the West and the Middle East in the early 2000s for his remarkable video installations and original photographic work. On the occasion of a solo exhibition (Khamsin Photography, 2007) at the Böhm Trade Center in Düsseldorf, he declared: “Today I tend to think that the filmed image is the most appropriate semantics, and that cinema allows us to talk about a subject by concentrating its multiple aspects […] The installation, by its format (montage, lived scenes, device) also poses the question of how to place a camera in front of these lived things while putting at a distance pathos or sentimentality. If my intention is to start from documents, I do not wish to make a documentary work. [I do not seek to create a fiction from a reality. Rather, I seek to open doors to make connections possible.”

Joseph Dadoune’s work has consistently questioned Judaism, post-colonialism, the periphery and homosexuality. His films and photographs shed light on this arch-contemporary symbolic violence.

For any creator – with a sense of history – a question is always asked: what stone to add? For Dadoune, it would be more like: what image to add to the images already there? Alain Badiou would have spoken of new fictions.

Like Ad Reinhardt, Joseph Dadoune has decided to bury the image, without making a clean sweep of the figure, the sign. Reinhardt liked to think of his Black Paintings as “a free, unmanipulable, useless, unsellable, irreducible, unphotographable, unreproducible, inexplicable icon.” Joseph Dadoune’s Black Boxes are, in their own way, part of the modernist logic of Reinhardt’s Ultimate Paintings. These works, as dry, hermetic and closed as they may be – to use the artist’s words – nevertheless echo very tangible realities. Counter Composition V (2011) evokes a vulva as much as Theo van Doesburg’s eponymous work (1924), which is why it was presented by the Galerie Le Minotaure last October at the Fiac, alongside works by Hans Bellmer, Marcel Duchamp, Louise Bourgeois, Man Ray or Pierre Molinier. With contemporary history never far away, Black Tunnel (2013) symbolizes one of the underground galleries built by the Palestinians to transport food between Gaza and Egypt. Palm Box overturns the fifties epinal imagery of the resort. As for Black Museum (2011), in front of which, a champion of relational aesthetics could fantasize multiple collective fictions, we prefer to take the time to wonder about the future lives of the White Cube. What is behind the White Cube? What symbolic violence? What ideology? What utopia seals the Black Museum? Brian O’Doherty’s essays appear then of a burning topicality and necessary (see “Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space” in Artforum, 1976).

These photographs, conceived in a studio with windows without frames or shutters – like eyes without eyelids – open to the outside world, in permanent contact with the street, neighbors, passers-by, life, necessarily refer to an exteriority, to an Other. Each photograph attempts to answer the questions that run through this set: what happens beyond the image? behind the image? behind the black box?

Like the artist’s studio, these photographs are not closed works, on the contrary, they impose neither authoritarian point of view, nor doxa. They are open works in the sense that Umberto Eco meant it.

Elodie Antoine, 2014