Marie Amar, 'La Maison', 2007.
'Leaves', 2006.
About a year ago, artist Marie Amar (b. 1962, Paris, where she lives and works) had a show entitled 'Leaves' at the Schusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow. On that occasion she presented beautiful images of dead leaves, blown up almost to human scale, each wrinkle, tear and imperfection visible, portrayed truly sculpturally. One of Susan Sontag's thoughts on photography, quoted in the project statement, sums up much of Amar's conceptual pursuit: 'The most enduring triumph of photography has been its aptitude for discovering beauty in the humble, the inane, the decrepit. At the very least, the real has pathos. And that pathos, is - beauty'. Reading the wonder inherent to the left-behind or even abject elements of life involves a special way of looking, of looking as the performance of transformation - changing that which has been abandoned for something that has been found.
'La Maison', Amar's current show at RX gallery in Paris, seems educated by an ongoing interest in the afterlife of not just objects, but spaces, situations. In the seventeen colour photographs of interiors included in the exhibition, Amar concocts narrative scenarios through familiar yet unexplained setting elements, a metaphorical slide show encouraging the act of finding, and transforming, that which has been abandoned.
Image one: a light-flooded view out from a window that's dramatically framed by accumulated dust, cobwebs and the debris of crumbling brick. Image two: military coloured clothes and bedding rolled up and hanging from the wood beams in a loft, light gently streaming in from a window in the back. Image three: a layered view through several rooms, juxtaposing elements of dereliction and of life (peeling wallpaper and dusty glass panes versus a radiator, crowded hanging coat rack and a light turned on).
Whose traces are these, and where have we stepped into? A 'modern Pompeii', the artist calls it, an environment sustaining the life of a former time, large and empty and already extinct, unearthed by opening the long shuttered doors and letting the light flood in. No more information than what's in front of us. And what if there is no mystery to solve...? 'For many years I have tried to capture on photograph things that show the passage of time, by uniting - in cohabitation - photography and sculpture'. Like in her 'Leaves', there's a subtle energy filling these empty rooms, transforming what hasn't been seen into something that can be experienced and found to be, in its own deeply layered terms, not only a trail of clues, but an homage to the unconscious beauty of vestiges.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
MARIE AMAR, 'LA MAISON'
To 30 Nov 2007.
Galerie RX
6 avenue Delcasse, 75008 Paris
T: +33(0)1 4563 1878
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