PARIS — Photographer Corinne Mercadier has always had a preference for solitary, shadowed landscapes — where, as in dollhouses or daydreams, scenarios might play them out in just a few mysterious moments, without any final resolution. Set against infinite horizons and dark skies, her stretches of deserted planes are marked with levitating objects and enigmatic figures, awaiting some unknown purpose.
And though the photographer has in recent years traded in her old Polaroid SX70 for a digital camera and Photoshop, newer forms of technique haven’t changed the distinctive style of Mercadier’s work. As evidenced in her two most recent series, “Black Screen” and “Solo” (on view at Paris gallery Filles du Calvaire), the photographer is still very much preoccupied by the mysteries lingering where time and space are uncertain.
In her show “Devant un champ obscur,” through December 1, the series “Solo” presents us with studies that evoke the surrealism of Magritte or de Chirico. Anonymous-seeming figures with unclear connection are assembled on flat terrestrial planes, which seem to stretch to infinity beneath low-hung dark skylines; miscellaneous objects are suspended in the air, as if thrown in the air and stopped abruptly in flight. It’s a land of labyrinths, of rectangles and spheres. The choreography is silent and immobile, but the viewer can also sense its past and future movement.
“The photographic movement is interesting to me because it registers what the eye hasn’t seen,” Mercadier recently told an interviewer. The images of “Solo” do just this — with their mysterious scenarios frozen in time, the viewer has no choice but to analyze every detail, questioning their meaning and the pervasive suggestion of absence.
The images of “Black Screen,” photographed within abandoned spaces and transfigured with positive-negative image reversal, appear less as captured moments than they do a succession of epiphanies. Bare-stripped interiors, with cracked walls and peeling paint, stand out in stark relief. Phosphorescent discarded objects, such as a pile of plates or disassembled bed, take on a magical-seeming significance, appearing to glow from internal light sources. In contrast to the stilled time of “Solo,” Mercadier here casts a spell upon an uninhabited landscape, using a magician’s wand to revive their elements of past time. Where the human eye might only see dereliction, the artist has created an enchanted world.
To see images by Corinne Mercadier from her show at Filles du Calvaire, click on the slideshow.