Saturday, November 22, 2008

Marina Gadonneix's Removed Landscapes

I recently found the work of Marina Gadonneix, whose series Removed Landscapes explores the green and blue sets of, what appear to be, film and television studios. As Jean-Pierre Rehm states in his essay "Fake For Real":

"It does not seem very daring to describe Marina Gadonneix’s pictures as being depopulated. The emptiness of the places she presents, one after another, demonstrates – if not a preliminary rule characterizing the whole series, a constant which is merely foiled by rare, always ethereal apparitions."

Rehm goes on to say:

"What is the hypothesis behind these “commissioned landscapes” ? No longer a call for the insurrection of analysis affirmed by Benjamin, nor the sad denunciation of a daily life alienated and prisoner of its own recurrent funerals. Neither the cynicism of an image played in a loop, having become the only horizon of the image itself. On the contrary, what is celebrated here is the decomposition of the image itself, its disintegration into simple elements : the explosion of colorful sparks. There is definitely no melancholy here, or else like a mask for a profane joy : there is no more landscape, no more paradise – space is left free, like above bunk beds with no bedding, for light, for it to diffuse and diffract. For an instant, the fake is colored in real, and the real becomes an image that offers it to us like a chance, its « entry point »."











From Top To Bottom:

Tribune On An Icefield

The Black Forest

The Niagara Falls

Battle Field

Seaside Seats

All Images © Marina Gadonneix