PARIS PHOTO 2022
10-13 NOVember - BOOTH E08


This year again, we will be present at Paris Photo, the largest and the most important international art fair dedicated to the photographic medium. The 2022 edition takes place at the Grand Palais Ephémère in front of the Eiffel Tower. Our selection at Paris Photo invites us to question the link between photography and performance, and explores the question of time, its visual representation of course, but also its physical representation induced by gesture, through the works of Catherine Balet, Denis Malartre, Morvarid K and Yannig Hedel.

True to her unique style, reluctantly going back and forth from painting to photography, French-British artist Catherine Balet brilliantly blends imaginary to reality so to tame the infinite versatility of nature over the seasons. The series “Endless” is characterized by four very large triptychs, each representing a season, and punctuated by smaller formats symbolizing the inter-season. It is as a true ode to life, is an invitation to embrace the ineluctable force of time.

 

Visual artist, Morvarid K was born in Tehran and although she left Iran relatively early, her attachment to the Iranian identity is the foundation of her relationship to the world and of her artistic sensitivity. Through the manipulation of photographic material, her work questions our relation to the world, the transformative memory, and the in-between. The photographic medium is the starting point, it anchors her work in reality, while the superposition and transformation techniques bring the additional expressions photography couldn’t capture. The print becomes a material, a stage in the creative process, before any gesture or performative experience complete the work. The heart of her artistic practice could be summed up as an infinite presence of absence.

 

Born in 1948, Yannig Hedel has been pursuing the marks of time on the urban architecture, day after day, season after season, and, in so doing, has spent the last 40 years building a remarkable and coherent body of work. While everything around him is accelerating, Yannig Hedel takes his time. And more precisely, he takes photographs of time itself! Street walker, he has rigorously captured the shadows, these ephemeral shapes made of light and time, to illustrate the passage of time. In all modesty, he has invented a new street photography, turning it into something formal, poetic and definitely silent. The way he plays with light and time, is purely figurative but also flirts with abstraction. As such his work could be defined as ‘abstract reality’.

 

Denis Malartre (1952-2017) experienced the emergence of modern photography of the 1970s and 80s, but soon realized he was not destined to become news reporter and thought narrative photography had no future. “And, very slowly, photography is dying, suffocated by millions of images, all similar, all submitted to that tiny window onto the world”, he writes in 1986. From then on he will attempt to question photography and deconstruct the medium in his practice. This reflection will lead in 1986 and 1987 to an obsessional work of installations and photographs made in a Parisian apartment. During this extremely creative period, he makes non-figurative images which he calls “The Objectal Photographs”. It will be his final work. Denis Malartre leaves behind an outstanding body of works, made of unique vintage silver-gelatin prints, unveiled for the first time at Paris Photo and proposed as an indivisible set, apart from a few ‘variation‘ prints available for sale as individual works.