TANIA MOURAUD, PHOTOGRAPHE

Authors: Tania Mouraud, Régis Durand

Publisher: Éditions Marval / Rue Visconti

For Tania Mouraud, photography is linked, in her own words, to the "art of strolling". Wandering through the city, letting oneself be carried away by the abundance of signs until an idea takes shape, or rather a method is established, a protocol, a principle of organizing these signs into a system. So that from strolling one moves to the work (at least to the beginnings of the work), from uncontrolled abundance to the uniqueness of the theme or series (for example, Shop Windows, or Rearview Mirror).

In a sense, this is indeed what the artist calls portraits of the city.

But things are not that simple, and each of the constituent principles of these ensembles dialectically explodes into its opposite, like an overripe fruit falling apart in our hands and revealing its inner matter in the process of transformation. The tensions and reversals I allude to are of several orders. There is first (but this order does not reflect a real experience, it is only an analytical chronology) – there is first, therefore, the pure intoxication of the multiple, the immense pleasure one imagines from number and the "undulating". Everything happens as if this multiplicity already had, within itself, an artistic character, in the sense that immersing oneself in it and evolving within it would already imply an artistic presence in the world.

(..)

On closer reflection, all of Tania Mouraud's photographic works concern spaces that are both closed and open – open, at least, to the view. Shop windows, cars, hay bales, plastic wrap around latex cuts, not to mention the Palace, a fine example of this tension that was perhaps its most distinctive hallmark. Everything happens as if this dual nature was of the utmost importance to the artist – captive devices found, ready-made in a way, that avoid any concern for composition, but leave the greatest room for variety and the accidental. To a certain extent, it seems as if we are in a logic of variation, in which the "theme" – the same choice of objects, shop window, car, hay bale, etc. – is taken up by the camera, which defines and imposes its own parameters (frame, depth of field, etc.), even if the ready-made is then modified by the use of the computer. In this sense, it can be said that the camera functions as a basic technological tool, without taking into account the usual attributes of the photographic act, but in full awareness of the "technical legitimacies" it implies.

One of the goals sought seems to be the minimization of perspectival illusion, to the benefit of frontality and flattening.

Régis Durand (excerpts from the preface)

HEAD PRINT

The first 30 copies are accompanied by a Rubato, an original print signed by the artist:

25 copies numbered from 1 to 25

5 non-commercial copies numbered from H.C. I to H.C. V

Year
2010
ISBN
978-2-919531-00-4
Pages
184
Price
426.54 EUR — In stock

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Cover of TANIA MOURAUD, PHOTOGRAPHE, Tania Mouraud