PHILIPPE DURAND
Born in 1963, Oulins (France). Lives in Paris.
Change, 1998
Photograph, 84 x 124cm
Courtesy of the Laurent Godin gallery, Paris
Doigts, Pollution, 2000
Three photographs
120 x 80cm (x 3)
Colección Fonds National d'Art Contemporain. Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Paris. Nº Inv. 2000-15, 2000-16, 2000-18.
In his photographic practice, drifting from urban to ruralscapes in search of small, formal anomalies at reality's heart. Philippe Durand has often come across the phenomenon of transparency (windows, windscreens, ponds), but always in the form of corruption, the tarnished and sullied, reflective and projected. The photograph entitled Change, taken from the series Bienvenue á Paris, multiplies optical effects and superimpositions, as much visual as conceptual, playing in particular with the polysemy of the reproduced word that operates like an absurd order.
The series Doigts, Pollution, realised in a public space in Brussels in 2000, proposes another relationship to transparency, this time perverted by pollution; dirtied panels, covered in dust, that only partially reflect the surrounding set. They have lost the crystalline virtue, but it is charged with a new pictorial complexity, multiplying the levels of understanding between transparency, opacity and reflection. The graffiti in the dust operates here like a palimpsest, foundation to a crude, urgent, and sometimes vulgar expression, destined to disappear. A written word founded upon the erased, using dirtiness as the canvas and transparency as the print.
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