Monday, September 27, 2010

Les Rencontres D'Arles

I originally published this a few weeks ago on my P & P Blog.

We went down to Arles to see the photo exhibition Rencontres D'Arles a couple of days ago. This is an enormous exhibition. It is displayed in venues all over the city. The main attraction for me was exhibition of Ernst Haas's work. It was displayed in Cloitre Saint-Trophime, a beautiful venue and worthy of a visit in its own right. In fact I spent as much time admiring the cloister and soaking up the atmosphere here as I did in the exhibition.

Arles itself is worthy of a visit. It is bursting with history and culture. The people are colourful and friendly. The light here is beautiful and Vincent Van Gogh was fascinated by the area. I could see why. It must have been a real change from the stiffness and formality of Paris. The light makes the most ordinary of things seem glowing and significantly beautiful. Colour is everywhere.

The exhibition itself was on two floors. The lower floor was lit by artificial light and the upper by natural. The difference between them was noticeable. The artificial lighting caused direct reflections from the glass and made it more difficult to enjoy the work behind it. But this was only a minor inconvenience. Of the work itself, well what can I say? For one thing seeing the prints is very different to looking at them on a website. This was one of the pictures that was on display. The reproduction on the web site does not do it justice. The colours here are faded. In the printed image the blue colour is a deeper blue and the yellow is stronger. The motel sign seems to glow. What interested me in this work was the way the colours work together to give a 3 dimensional feel to the picture. It was easy to forget that I was looking at a flat piece of paper. Another thing that was apparent was that Haas in his composition was deliberate. Nothing was there in the frame by chance. One of the photos showed some old rusty tin cans and a bale of rusty wire on the ground in a field. At first look it appeared that was all that was there. There was a kind of "so what" feeling to the picture. Until you noticed the background, which was the top 1/3 of the frame. Here you could see trees in full autumn regalia, reds, yellows, golden browns all the colours that were in the rusting metal cans and wire.

On the introduction to the works the curators says this;

For some time now, however, the pictures that brought him a worldwide reputation have been derided by critics and curators as ‘too commercial’: for some reason he has come to be seen as too feel-good, too sentimental. As a result his prestige has declined in relation to that of later practitioners of colour, and in particular William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz. In parallel with his commissions, though, Haas never stopped working in a more personal vein—for himself, you might say—and here we find a totally different kind of sensibility: these images are edgier, freer, more ambiguous—in other words much more radical. With very few exceptions they were never published or exhibited during his lifetime, perhaps because Haas feared incomprehension or a lack of appreciation. And yet these are works of great complexity and stand up very well against anything that came after them. This exhibition offers a selection.

I found that a little sad. Perhaps it doesn't mean he kept these locked away but to me that is what comes across. Also I think it says something about the fashions in art and how fickle it is. It certainly says something about our need to compare two different things like apples and oranges and reach a subjective decision on which one is "better".

Trends aside the pictures were, in a too well used word - beautiful. Dare I say, and this is my own interpretation, they display a love of colour just for colours sake. On the TAOP course colour is a separate section all to itself. The colour circle is discussed as are colour relationships, cool colours, warm colours ect. This exhibition reminded me that intuitively we all "understand" colour. However not many people take the time to study it. We take it for granted. If Ernst Haas had a message for us it would be to look again.

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