in perceptivo; Metalocus, kepler 452 b, espace valles art contemporain, philippe calandre
À 1400 années-lumière de notre Terre, dans la constellation
du Cygne, le télescope spatial de la Nasa a récemment détecté une planète
tellurique dont les calculs confirmant son existence ont établi qu’elle
tournait autour de son soleil à une distance qui la rendrait habitable. C’est
sur cette exoterre baptisée Kepler 452b que Philippe Calandre a situé
quelques-unes de ses dernières compositions architecturales. Celles-ci forment
des utopies : des non lieux,
des nulle part au sens premier
du terme. Et pourtant ces chimères procèdent de fragments prélevés au réel.
Après avoir longtemps parcouru le globe en photographe, Philippe Calandre a
décidé d’organiser désormais de grands voyages immobiles vers les terres ou les
cités inconnues que révéleront ses irréprochables photomontages. Puisant ses
matériaux de construction dans le stock d’images qu’il a accumulé au cours de
ses pérégrinations et reportages, il élabore de très savantes combinaisons où
les hybridations fonctionnent à merveille. Comme le héros des Villes invisibles d’Italo
Calvino, qui spécule sur « des
villes trop vraisemblables pour être vraies », il cherche à faire advenir une réalité augmentée
par l’imaginaire. Sa fascination pour les architectures industrielles, dont
l’esthétique découle de la nécessité pratique et de l’impératif économique, l’a
conduit à concevoir d’étranges complexes usiniers. Hérissés de silos et de
cheminées crachotant leurs fumées, parcourus de tuyauteries et d’escaliers
inextricables, greffés de passerelles métalliques surplombant des paysages de
déserts, ses sites possèdent la beauté des enfers.
Personne certainement
n’aimerait se rendre avec plaisir sur ces lieux d’obscurs labeurs — ils sont
d’ailleurs vides de toute présence humaine —, mais ils envoûtent par la
troublante mélancolie qui s’en dégage. Porté par la liberté de création que lui
inspire sa méthode, Philippe Calandre en est venu à inventer ses propres
formes, et ainsi à dessiner avec la photographie. Les architectures aux développements géométriques qu'il propose
dès lors, les monuments et les cités qu’il a édifiés comme des jeux de
construction semblent, par la grâce de leurs structures, une manière de nous
souhaiter la bienvenue sur sa planète.
Jean-Pierre Chambon
1400 light years away from our planet earth, within the constellation of the Swann, the NASA spatial telescope recently detected an earthlike planet, affirming pre-existing calculations and confirming its rotation around a sun within a distance, which makes this planet inhabitable.
Philippe Calandre has placed some of his last architectural compositions on this exo-earth, baptized as Kepler 452b. The compositions form utopias: the non-sites, the no-where spaces in the direct meaning of the word. Yet these chimeras embody fragments taken from reality.
Having extensively travelled the globe as a photographer, Philippe Calandre decided to reorganize his vast, halted-in-time journeys to unknown lands and cities, and to transform them into pure photomontages. Drawing material from stock of images accumulated in the course of his travels and photo reportages, he elaborates on the images, developing them into highly mastered combinations, where these hybrids marvelously reveal their essence.
Like the heroes of Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino) that speculate about «cities too likely to be true», he searches for a reality that is escalated by the imaginary.
Fascination with industrial architectures, where esthetic is derived from a practical necessity and economic requirements, guides him to conceive strange industrial complexes. Spiked with silos and chimneys puffing out smoke, covered in pipelines and entangled in stairs, checkered with metal bridges over deserted sceneries, these sites possess a hellish beauty.
No doubt, no one would wander through these sites of hard labor with pleasure – they are indeed empty of any human presence, but they charm with their troubling melancholy. Driven by creative freedom that is inspired by his method, Philippe Calandre invents his own shapes and even draws with photography.
Geometric architectural developments, as well as monuments and cities built as games for construction, are all offered with such structural gracefulness that they seem to open up a way to welcome us to his planet.
Jean-Pierre Chambon
I superimpose and
recompose architectural panoramas from a figurative imaginary. Each composition
brings forth an industrial landscape, which strangely affirms itself by
revealing its utopian identity. Man has constructed it, but is now bizarrely
absent from it. These remains of contemporary architecture are nothing but
memorial sanctuaries; there is no sign of activity, only a space-time continuum
that allows the soul to wander.
Vestiges
of Utopias
Tower of Babel, Babylonian astronomical observatory, cyclopean stone walls, Piranesian bridges, the megalithic monument of Stonehenge…The most unreasonable references come to mind in describing the imaginary landscapes of Philippe CALANDRE. Imaginary? Not altogether, because his work utilizes and adds upon photomontage. From views of industrial sites taken by camera the artist creates digital collages on his computer, matching fragments of images and thus recomposing reality at will. He not only makes all human presence disappear, but he multiplies the confusion of hangars, of silos, of chimneys, of beams, of piping, and of flights of stairs, transforming an already complex real into Daedalusian vision and a waking dream. Grandiloquent architectures of vast perspectives, planted in desert spaces, halfway from the prodigious forge of Vulcan and Mount Othrys of the Titans…
www.philippecalandre.com
The
photography of Philippe Calandre allows the contemplation of a fascinating
series of dreamlike landscapes: a number of architectural utopias that he
patiently and impeccably constructed from fragments of images brought back from
his many voyages around the world.
The sentiment of place and the question of
the real haunt the entire work of Philippe Calandre. Professional press
photographer, he quickly seized upon the possibility that was offered him by a
documentary approach initially intended to play with the medium of the visible,
the affect of a disorder, and thus to launch fictions, to give rise to
narrations.
The diverse series that mark his artistic
career provide evidence of the particular interest that he carries in
construction and in architecture, a subject for him propitious to a dreamlike
investigation on the human adventure. If, to take a formula from Holderlin,
“poetically man dwells,” this is most often obliquely… In the series “Killer
House,” Philippe Calandre blurred the landscapes of dwelling places of serial
killers to leave only white outlines; in “Ghost Stations” he did not fix the
pigments of the images that he took from abandoned service stations, in such a
way that the images progressively fade during their exhibition; in “Blind,” he
presents a hallucinating collection of blank walls…
In 2012, from his photographs of industrial
sites, whose architectural forms are only dictated by the logic of
productivity, without aesthetic criteria—but, since the inventories of Bernd
and Hilla Beicher, one knows how to recognize their beauty—he had the idea of
using photomontage for introducing the imaginary (“Factory Fictions”). Since,
his work has consisted of drawing fragments from the enormous photographic
reserve that he has accumulated over the course of time. “I decided to abolish
the taking of photographs, as well as the subject borrowed from the real, to
finally give the illusion of an image that could tell what it wants, even if
the subject doesn’t truly exist.”
The chilling splendor of the landscapes of
Philippe Calandre is sublimated by the extreme precision that he brings to the
montage of his images in which, apart from the composition, all is coherent,
the luminosity, the meaning of the shadows and the perfection of the
fade-to-gray that allow for slight connections to transpire. The photography
thus transports us into another world composed of the fragments of the real,
into a labyrinthine world of Piranesian complexity. In a strange dream world in
which bloom nightmares. In the vestiges of a worrying utopia.
J.P.C
In Perceptivo
Exhibition
of the photographs of Philippe Calandre. From the 22nd of September
through the 29th of October
At
L’Espace Vallès
Private
viewing Thursday September 22 from 6:30
The
exhibition is part of the cycle Paysages>paysage initiated by Le Laboatoire,
urban structure, as well as the Days of Contemporary Art the 15 and 16 of
October.
From Daedalus to Babel
Virtuoso of photomontage, Philippe Calandre, transforms industrial sites into labyrinthine cities. At the Espace Vallès, he offers a revisiting of the megalomaniac architecture of modern times, a reconsideration of the great myths of ancient architecture.
“Industrial architecture has no aesthetic constraint, but just the constraints of of productivity, explains Philippe CALANDRE. It has more free forms, but more violent ones, because they are designed with only productivity in mind.” Departing from this postulate, the photographer allows us to discover worlds as grandiose as they are rickety, megalopolises menaced by collapse. The fate dealt to architecture struck with the delirium of power (whether they be Stalinesque, Mussolinian, or achieved by the madness of capitalist grandeur) is that of cathedrals, of pyramids, and of mausoleums: that of ruin. There exists a powerful poetic from the uncultivated world of industry. Philippe CALANDRE engulfs himself in this imaginary world: dusty buildings, corroded walls, tarnished windows, etc. A veritable magic results, but a cold magic. The truly monumental formats of these impressions (tied to the extreme care brought to the construction of the photographic montages) leads the visitor to the exhibition to enter through the ground floor and into the image. One experiences, before the photomontages of Philippe CALANDRE, a true feeling of being crushed. And a vertigo that takes hold.
Jean-Louis Roux
"In perceptivo"
Photographs
of Philippe Calandre
translation : jennifer Hamon Salk lake city 2016
translation : jennifer Hamon Salk lake city 2016
If all human beings seem to have escaped from Philippe Calandre's gloomy universes, his grey tone spectrum flies over (un)real architectures, these appears as entities potentially responsible for this industrial disaster sketched using Mr Calandre's photomontage process. While collecting pieces of architectural perspectives captured during his travels, Philippe Calandre designs a fictitious new world surprisingly so close to our reality.
Reality is becoming ambivalent: dusk sights and architecture knowledge embedded in the collective unconscious are transformed in an illusion using a virtual composition, grayish tone colored as if it was extracted from the movie "La Route" directed by John Hillcoat.
By using these abandoned industrial landscapes, the artist proposes a pessimistic view on our society, between nightmares and human vanity. Concrete and steel are smoothed using blurred photographic grains in the picture, this increases the trouble experienced due to the image reality. Bored by the Hearth environment, Philippe Calandre is exploring a new planet, with this exhibition In situ named In perspectivo , he offers a solution to escape from the Hearth. The diving platform in the entrance brings to mind Grenoble Olympic Games in 1968, whereas the Kepler collection describes a parallel world.
A strange fascination for Surrealist landscapes and the architecture emerge from Philippe Calandre photomontages, this interrogates our own relationship with our contemporaneous environment, swamped by factories. Dark pictures, but still really attracting due to this perfect aesthetic which leads to an (extra)terrestrial (un)known walk around, in a future bloodcurdling world
Translation Christophe Chevee NY 2016
Translation Christophe Chevee NY 2016
www.philippecalandre.com
Philippe Calandre / Photographe Auteur
_ Sélection d’expositions personnelles
2021 SPACE FACTORIES - La TEC - La Théorie des Espaces Courbes - Centre d’art alternatif - Voiron
2020 DEDOUBLEMENT REALITE - Espace Valles centre d’art contemporain - Grenoble
2019 IN PERCEPTIVO 2 - Hôtel du musée - Arles
2018 BELGICA PARADISE - Le Hangar Art Center - Bruxelles
2018 IN PERCEPTIVO - Galerie Vrais Rêves - Lyon
2018 MINDSPACES - Kalinka Art-Gallery - Pondichery - Inde
2017 UTOPIA - Galerie Goutal - Aix en Provence
2016 IN PERCEPTIVO - Espace Valles - Centre d’art contemporain - Grenoble
2015 META LOCUS - Andata.Ritorno - Llaboratoire d’art contemporain - Genève
2015 ISOLA NOVA - Espace Richaud - Versailles
2014 - 2015 ISOLA NOVA - Wilmotte Gallery at Lichfield Studios - Londres
2013 - 2014 ISOLA NOVA - Fondation Wilmotte - Venise
2012 FICTION FACTORIES - Galerie Esther Woerdehoff - Paris
_ Selection d’expositions collectives
2020 TEMPS SUSPENDUS - Plateforme - Espace d’art contemporain - Paris
2019 DO NOT INTERRUPT YOUR ACTIVITY - Espace potentiel - Galerie de l’ERG - Bruxelles
2018 BIT20/Biennale de l’image tangible - Plateforme - Espace d’art contemporain - Paris
2014 THERE IS NO CURRENT EXHIBITION - Andata.Ritorno - Laboratoire d’art contemporain - Genève
2009 FOTO POVERA 5 - Opal Gallery - Atlanta
2009 HORIZON VERTICAL (Bunker) - Villa Rothschild - Cannes
2008 PLEDGE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS - Womblock Art Center - Taipei - Taiwan
2006 WORKING PROGRESS - Art District with Pina Bausch’s Company, pear2 - Taiwan
2006 GRANDES VACANCES (Bunkers) - Galerie Anne Barrault - Paris
2006 SUGAR FIELD FACTORY - Kio-A-Thau Residency Ciaotou - Taïwan
2004 SURVEILLANCE « Dans les pas de Lucien Hervé » - Musée André Malraux - Le Havre
2002 AD VITAM AETERNAM, photographies & videos - Galerie Schroeder Romero - New York
2002 GHOST STATIONS « Traces d’humanité » - Galerie Anne Barrault - Paris
2001 SILOS – FIAC - Galerie Anne Barrault - Paris
2000 GHOST STATIONS - Artissima - Galerie Anne Barrault - Turin
_ Collections publiques & privées
Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, FRAC - France / Fondation Wilmotte / La Cornue S.A
Olivier Waltman collection privée / Anne Barrault, collection privée / Fondation Artémide
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