In the continuity of past years, Galerie Arenthon has invited a photographer to explore its collection of modern engravings and lithographs, creating a dialogue between prints by the great artists of the early 20th century and the works of a contemporary photographer.
This year Denis Darzacq will be the one taking part in the conversation. The works of artists such as Picabia, Léger and Le Corbusier had a profound influence on his training, and still do today. This influence became formally apparent to Darzacq as he browsed the works in Gallery Arenthon. Surprisingly, the shapes and colours of his new series of photographic assemblages respond naturally to Fernand Léger's works from the years 1929-30, reproduced in the iconic magazine Derrière le Miroir.
In the Doublemix series, created with Anne-Iris Lüneman, Darzacq blends photography and ceramics: the result is a series of unique works in which two plastic worlds intersect. With the addition of printmaking, an interplay of correspondences takes shape, and by some mysterious mechanism, Picabia's cogs and gears resonate with Darzacq's reds.
Former press photographer and member of the VU agency, Denis Darzacq began focusing his work in 1995 on plastic photography and the interactions of individuals from minority backgrounds with the society surrounding them.
His photographs are built on paradoxical realities between which he strives to create a dialogue. Among his best-known series, La Chute (2006) and Hyper (2010) lift and levitate bodies into the city or in supermarkets; Act 1 and Act 2 (2010-2015) free bodies and minds from disability.
At the same time, he works with staged objects and mysterious photographic assemblages. These photographs, freed from the duty to inform, concrete, and abstract at once, question the materiality and meaning of images.
Galerie Arenthon
While specializing in modern engravings, lithographs and rare books, Galerie Arenthon highlights photography of the twentieth and twenty-first century for its participation in PhotoSaintGermain. In this way, the gallery demonstrates the link between photography and the multiples and other works on paper.