Mardi 19 Juillet 2016 17:18:01 par Alix Joly dans Expositions

When we depart, walking over the summer leaves and the meadows which confidently and piercingly surrendered to the sun, memories resonate in each of our steps. We leave regret and desire behind, while the future lurks ahead in the bushes. And this is only an image from a lost garden – made from a fabric, woven from flowers and freckles. The photographer Isa Marcelli, born in Algeria in 1958, has many such images in her work - images which appear like small flashbacks. They are reminiscences of a childhood landscape slumbering within us. One work shows an empty garden chair, which was never able to tell its full story. Another shows a tree-lined road, over which we crossed into the present with a heavy heart. All of these images are studded with abundant symbols and small mysteries. They are full of fog and soft focus, as if they were elementary particles of our earliest dreams.
For the French artist Isa Marcelli, photography is like working in a fairytale laboratory. She creates pictures from ethanol and ether, collodion and bromide salts, which reach far back to the archetypes of the unconscious. „Each of my pictures“, Marcelli states, „are sketches of a distinct world. They are the medium of expression of the person I really am behind all the layers.“ Isa Marcelli, who now lives in a village near Paris, has continuously experimented with historical cameras and printing processes since she began working with photography – first with Polaroids, Holga cameras and self-made pinhole cameras, and later with ferrotypes and collodion plates. She has adopted several mid-19th century processes and transferred them into the present world of smoothly calculated pixel images. Thus, over the past eight years, she has regressed to often unimaginable exposure times, with much empathy and joy for the photochemical experiment. This has enabled her to create prints which are rich in emotion, delicacy and fragility.

Serie «Parfums» 2012 ©Isa Marcelli

Marcelli‘s photographs will be shown from July 15th in the Berlin gallery Johanna Breede PHOTOKUNST under the title „Le laboratoire des rêves“ (The Laboratory of Dreams). Melancholic, playful and often surreal, her photographs show a strange world, which slumbers directly beneath the surface of reality. „I want to find a way in which one can forget reality. I am happy when my pictures open themselves to dreaming or subjective perception.“ The autodidact at times achieves this by reverting to unusual montages - and at other times by intensifying the composition with poetic arrangements. Although Marcelli‘s photographs always develop a magical-narrative pull, all their stories remain suggestive. They are as mysterious and magical as the gardens deep in our buried childhood. A fabric so fine and fragile that it could only thrive in the laboratory or our dreams. (Ralf Hanselle)

 

Serie «Parfums» 2012 ©Isa Marcelli

Source : press release