Bernard Guillot: L’oeuvre au noir

Press Release

Bernard Guillot

Photograph and Mixed Media

October 25th – December 1st, 2007

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of photograph and mixed media works by the French-born artist Bernard Guillot in his first New York solo show.
The reception is on Thursday, October 25th, 6-8pm and the artist will be present.

The pictures in this show are of Egypt mostly, of Cairo and its vicinities: The City of the Dead, Petra, 30 winters at the Hotel Maffet Astoria. Other images record the photographer’s walks in other cities: Paris, Nice, Brooklyn etc. These cities are depicted in nocturnes and diurnals, interiors and exteriors from 1979 to 2006.

The ensemble creates its own geography, a map of a philosophical journey made of intuitive parallels, composed outside any straight chronology. It would be difficult to hazard a guess as to the time of day or the place and its context. Bernard Guillot’s images are not looking to transmit mundane information: years, months, or seasons. It is not too much to say that his work is at the antipodes of the touristy, of Oriental clichés and Parisian ballades. For nothing is more foreign to its nature than vernacular or documentary images. The pictures are always subject based, but never anecdotic. There is always a desire to orchestrate a vision, a story of light, inscription of time. A few metaphors could appear: Carpe Diems and Memento Mori, and beyond that, homage to eternity.

The photographer does not seem to wish to fit into a genre, to classify the world, apply an aesthetical formula. Nothing is systematic. Bernard Guillot is a mischievous and mystical image maker. He displays playful, surreal compositions side-by-side with contemplative minimalist ones. He seems to place no boundaries on what should be photographed and what should not. One senses in his photography a freedom of being, a desire for endless inquiry. Bernard Guillot develops intimacies, with places, people, things and his own reflection. He looks deeply, comes close, touches. He pays places several visits, over days and years. He is faithful, persistent in his explorations. He takes time, spaces the photographic gaze. And he seems to do so out of reverence for nature and respect for objects and human beings.

Bernard Guillot is a photographer with the genuine curiosity of a dedicated walker. He walks with an intense awareness; with none of the flaneur’s old-fashioned nonchalance. Whether he is walking up and down the corridor of the Hotel Maffet-Astoria in Cairo or in the haunting landscapes of an old city like Petra, Bernard is never aimless. He walks with intent; he looks in physical structures for something metaphysical. This metaphysical quality is intensified by the mineral aspect of his black and white pictures. One finds the expression of a Heideggerian metaphysics of dwelling in his representations. “To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell.” A piece of eternity is translated in the solidity given to the still elements. The stillness of these large structures approaches pure presence. And we are reminded that for us, moving beings, there is an eternal mystery in the immobile, the statuesque, and the stony.
Bernard Guillot looks as intently for traces of time in aged walls as he does in archetypal architectures. From this material he creates worlds of textures and surfaces as varied as desire. He scrutinizes the transient in a metaphysical search deep into the real, through light and beyond.
For him, it is in the photographed thing that wisdom resides, in a world robbed of color and reduced to a bi-dimensional plan. A large number of his pictures have a mental and abstract nature. They are prone to a delicate bascule. Their signs can gently be seen slipping out of their social readings and into something more complex. Their ultimate rendering is the creation of a poetic writing in photography.

For Bernard the photographic act requires the calm and concentration of the hunter. The photographer uses the patient trap of the long exposure. The instinct to photograph is a carnal one; it kills and immortalizes all at once. At the core of photography there is an oscillation between appearance and disappearance. The effect of the long pause is to empty space. Living beings become ghostly, losing their physicality. The photographic mirror is an imposture; it can turn the healthiest one into a vampire, a soul without a reflection. In photography, what seems to be an instant is in fact a segment, more or less long, but a segment nonetheless. Time has been contracted: what you are seeing is a beginning and an end all at once. Bernard Guillot’s photography is a paradoxical place of time, a poetical space flirting with destruction and eternal life, an “oeuvre au noir”.

Bernard Guillot was born 1950, in Basel, Switzerland and studied at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Art, Paris, where he obtained his diploma in 1975. He has traveled extensively in the Middle East, Europe and the US. Since the mid-1970s, he has maintained a studio in Cairo
(Hotel Maffet-Astoria), and from that time, he became an integral part of that city’s lively art community, helping to build cultural links between Egypt and France. He participated in the 1984 Alexandria Biennial where he won a gold medal (drawing). Other awards include Villa Medici, 1989 for his work on the “City of the Dead”, and the 2003 NADAR Prize for his book “Le Pavillon Blanc” which was chosen as the best photography publication in France. He is represented in numerous collections including Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Musee d’Art Moderne, Nice, France, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris and American University, Cairo, Egypt.

Barbara Stehle-Akhtar, Ph.D
Art Historian and Independent Curator
New York, 2007f