Galerie Beckel-Odille-Boïcos 1, rue Jacques Coeur 75004 Paris France
Mois de la photo 2010 Point information 5,7 rue de Fourcy 75004 Paris France
Cézanne executed 44 oil paintings and 43 drawings and watercolors of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. Working doggedly and with passion on the motif, he introduced this mountain into the history of art.
Jean-Christophe Ballot knew of these facts, but no more. What was missing was an encounter, a confrontation with the mountain. The Sainte-Victoire existed only in his imagination, it still needed to be embodied.
He surveyed the mountain in search of a revelation. From this experience, which took place over four seasons, and in echoing to the “Thirty six Views of Mount Fuji” by Hokusai, the artist produced a sequence of thirty six views in forty six pictures.
With the addition of ten views of the quarry of Bibémus, a mountain hollow where Cézanne’s stone cabin still stands, this set of photographs features in the exhibition “The Four Seasons of the Sainte Victoire” and the book “Thirty six Views of the Sainte Victoire” published by Gallimard. Combining the images of Jean-Christophe Ballot with texts by Peter Handke, this book reflects an unprecedented meeting between two bodies of work and two timeless and novel visions of a landscape that is part of our natural and cultural heritage.
The mountain in the Judeo-Christian tradition is the place of ascent, exertion, penitence and solitude. This spiritual progress can be found in many religions: abandoning the profane world and rising towards the Divine.
Jean-Christophe Ballot believes in the spiritual values of Buddhism, emphasizing the ephemeral nature of things, those small nothings that photography can capture so well: a patch of light on a piece of bark in the foreground or on a distant mountaintop… Shintoïsm also worships the power of nature and the grandeur and majesty of the mountain. This work represents the photographer’s poetic meditation as he contemplates nature.
But is this enough to understand the fascination that mountains exert on Man? The artist bears witness: “felt once again, as I roamed the footpaths of the Sainte-Victoire, the same sensations that I experienced on the road to Santiago de Compostela in the fall of 1996. It was on the road to Compostela that I discovered the joy of walking in nature, physical exertion to the point of losing oneself, of dissolving."
The gaze is lifted to the horizon or to the summit of a mountain.