Photographies du soir

This publication by the French artist highlights his photographic work on color through a series of 41 reproductions, accompanied by texts by Claire Moulène and Mick Peters.

Julien Carreyn’s outdoor photographs explore our country, its difficulties in negotiating its prestige, essentially linked to the past, and its aesthetics obeying the criteria and tastes assumed to be those of the middle classes. This is neither a critical approach nor a testimonial, but rather an escape; a desire to distance oneself spatio-temporally, starting from a peri-urban area on the edge of nothing. In this exploration, a half-empty parking lot or a hairdresser’s sign becomes, subject to certain aesthetic choices of framing and distance, a Morandi-like composition (substituting Renault Mégane and Citroën Picasso for bottles, cones and funnels) or a curious blend of semiology and nostalgia. Some images are printed in black and white on objects, perhaps postcard-sized Plexiglas paperweights, while others undergo a treatment in which certain colors are veiled, muted or suppressed (usually green and yellow), underscoring the aesthete’s approach without denying the strange seduction that comes from the discreet charm of blandness. After these interventions, what remains of proximity in the corpus is again pushed aside in favor of the law of the genre, in this case the nude, whose occasional appearance generates artifice and displaces the images as a whole into the realm of staging and pure fiction.