Entry via photography

Vincent Chevillon is a sculptor, but his art has a great deal to do with the photographic image, whether old, found, second-hand or his own, recent.
This photobook, which brings together pictures taken some years back, previously existed as a dummy in several versions, the most recent of which was more broad-based, complete, fluid than its predecessors.There remains the principle of a plain cover, without a title or the name of either the artist or the publisher – no information on the outside, or indeed on the inside (apart from the present text).
But it’s not a case of secrecy, or privacy, that’s now being revealed side by side with a constituted sculptural oeuvre, more distant, capable of monumentality, and tending toward the universal… or what if? Perhaps – but in that case without pathos, or anything (too) personal.
Urging those who discover it, if they wish, to project themselves into it so as to recognise it.

« My work, » writes the artist, « comprises a synthesis of experience. I don’t say anything particular, and I don’t make any claims. I state my experience. The tension it produces is concentrated in remote, almost silent images. The forms thus created construct a rhetoric that’s more evocative that significative.»

Among the possible filiations, this photobook owes something, however distantly, to Walker Evans (American Photographs) and Wright Morris (The Inhabitants), but also Paul Strand and Daido Moriyama (though without the American tropism of the first two). And this, for the acute consciousness of the accuracy to be attained in the arrangement of images in a book, which others seek to attain in exhibitions.
The character of the locations, closed, and that of the objects, full, contrasts with the movement, the energy of a little girl and her carelessness. The stuffed animals, their skeletons, are contradicted by the vitality of the plant life, the proliferation of leaves, flowers and fruit. And the tomb, by angels’ wings.
There are those curves, circles; those lines, architectures; textures; it’s all legible, tactile. Shadows pass; in darkness, an empty chair, alone.From recollections to reflections, something like alliterations recur, from page to page.
Cabin’s not ruin. What’s leaning, spotted, left for dead… is not lauded.
Some unknowable figures cross this cold, visceral universe without explicit seduction, but exerting a certain charm. Against blackness, harshness, something persists, very physical, that speaks of man, his presence/absence, in nature still sovereign.

« The relationship of the viewer to the object is one of the aims of my research. I want to define the space between the object and the viewer. Whether in books, sculpture or photography, I bring experience of nomadism and solitude into a closed space, with a dialectic between the condition of the created object and its referent. My research produces rituals that are personal, then intended for the viewer, stamped with ambivalence, between fetish and sculpture, diary and fiction, the grotesque and the sacred. »

It’s here: nothing exotic or distant, either in space or in time. The everyday, in no way ossified; people and things changing; nothing ever again to be as it was; everything altered, reborn. Irreversibility always counterbalanced.
It’s – among other things – what a young man has chosen as constituents of his world, the world, at the point where he gets to the wider, different world of adulthood and maturity.
But this world, as described, isn’t so much his as it can be ours. Like him we’ve seen, but probably disregarded, landscapes, interiors, animals, these folds, this snow, speed.
These images – unlike those he borrows, treats, with their context, references he’s adopted – we know nothing about them other than what he shows us.
Neither fiction nor document, they could still generate one narration, or more.
Everything’s up for interpretation. The artist gives no watchword; expression takes place through images, to the exclusion of any message (« Veux-tu m’épouser? »).

« Autonomy with regard to a discourse relating to the work is one of the objectives I set myself. Unlike stories, there’s no outcome, just an extension of doubt, a fall without impact. »

The photographs in this book are the out-of-shot side of his sculptures and installations (and vice versa).
The silence of the photographers? This time, the reason for the self-effacement of the artist might be the self-expression of anthropologistic photography.

Anne Bertrand