Paris, Amsterdam, Antibes
A Trilogy of Cosmic Awakening
Beaubourg, Paris — 21/02/24
Visiting the photography exhibition — “Corps a Corps”
Spotlit black and white faces stare out from the subdued grey blanket wrapping Paris — heavy under ballooning rain.
The show of photographs is on the top floor of the famous tubular building, it’s Drapeau colours resisting the weight of the solid mass of sky in defiant verticals of red and blue.
Inside, old school portraits hover at eye level in the hushed dark of the exhibition — tiny Photobooth snippets hung alongside blown up grainy, grinning vistas from another world. Collaged elements — noses not quite aligning with eyes, mouths — a shake in the warp — minuscule and now preserved forever on aged, undulating paper. Here, room after room of underlit, over spotted men, women and children beckon in heightened contrast — where blacks are black, and the whites of eyes scream out of the frame with a direct, open, unassuming gaze at you, the voyeur.
Come in deeper — the portraits splinter, show details of a thumb in a mouth, navels stacked in rows — eye slippage…
Then, the surreal; a Trilby hat, shot from above, is a clitoris — a leg has faces drawn into its varicose veins and Man Ray’s Dadaist works are the obvious…
