ROSANNA ALBERTINI about JEAN-LOUIS GARNELL

JEAN-LOUIS GARNELL  sent me from Chatenay-Malabry (France) images from the seventies, he found them in boxes at his parents’ house. He was then photographic amateur, had a small printing laboratory in the basement. Music was more important than images.  Before his mathematical thinking, before photography as a major artistic endeavor.

REPETITION    “An apple after Cézanne? More than one. Repetition is only time, it’s also a new feeling of light that plays with human thoughts and contemplates them.” (J-L G.)

For decades of photography, and now in paintings, Garnell is still wondering how to free the images from the cages of optics, psychology, romanticism, representation, and from the social dance people share in their life time. Images should rest on their own, giving us their essence to be perceived, then quietly fading away from a landscape that doesn’t stop changing when nobody is there. Ephemeral, irrelevant? The equation is inevitable. Lucky the poet who  writes: “you perceive what fades away with you, you cannot grasp what is gong to last” (Edmond Jabès). Words. What about images, that hit our senses when the reality they contain has gone? Images are conservative.

YOUNG PEOPLE TODAY:

 

YOUNG PEOPLE IN THE SEVENTIES   (Each diptych includes the original edition of the record: vinyl and cover) AMERICAN and FRENCH MUSIC

 [Please, click on the image to see it bigger]

 

 

 

 

 

A DIPTYCH WHICH IS JUST A WHITE CUP BROKEN IN TWO HALVES, EXACTLY ALIKE.

I use it as a metaphor: even broken, the form gives a sense of permanence. In between the edges, the chaotic and fading concert of irrelevant noises, the rush of life. Chateaubriand wispers to me: “Doesn’t each small human being, indifferent, ready to be forgotten, give a true measure of the big events? We can only survive through our style.”

 

http://www.Jeanlouisgarnell.net