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9th Gonesse Biennial of Contemporary Art
Pôle culturel de Coulange, 2014
Le Croult
Framed Lightjet print (from analog negative),
180 x 225 cm
Edition of 1+1 A.P.
Commissioned by the Gonesse Biennial
“By ‘modernity’, I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable”.
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life
Inspired by Gustave Courbet’s paintings, in particular The Quarry, Deer Hunting in the Forests of the Grand Jura (1857), A Thicket of Deer at the Stream of Plaisir-Fountaine (1866), and Jo, the Beautiful Irish Girl (1865-1866),
this photographic tableau was made along the small river that runs through the town of Gonesse (Val d’Oise, France), where some local secondary school girls, familiar with this spot, guided Benoît Grimbert. Reappropriating Robert Bresson's “cinematographic” protocol, according to which what the filmaker calls “models” must not overplay their role, they have together revisited Charles Baudelaire's statement in The Painter of Modern Life (Le Peintre de la vie moderne) that “each age has a deportment, a glance and a smile of its own”.
Gustave Courbet,
La Curée, chasse au chevreuil dans les forêts du Grand Jura (1857), oil on canvas, 210.2 x 183.5 cm
Gustave Courbet, Jo, la belle irlandaise (1865-1866), oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm, Nationalmuseum (Stockolm) versionGustave Courbet,
Remise de chevreuils au ruisseau de Plaisir-Fontaine (1866),
oil on canvas, 174 x 209 cm
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