Plongée

2017

"Conceived as an encounter between two artists, two mediums, two worlds, but also with a particular place, the exhibition invites visitors to plunge into the darkness of the basement of Ourcq Blanc, where Marguerite Bornhauser's photographs meet Léa Dumayet's sculptural installations.

The former, a graduate of the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles, presents here for the first time a new series of images made during several journeys. After depicting the plastic superficiality of our contemporary world in her series Plastic Colors, she now shifts her gaze, in a more intimate and contemplative approach, towards natural elements and the dazzlement they bring, always in search of a sudden emergence: an unexpected and daring conjunction of colours, shapes and textures. Here, we are dazzled by the sun glittering on turquoise water. There, a fluorescent yellow burning bush rises from a desert expanse. Elsewhere still, the intense red of a plant strangely scorched by the heat blazes, while on the horizon sky and sea merge in a subtle gradient of blues.

The latter, a graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, makes the materials she uses and the places she occupies the essential starting points of each installation. Working instinctively, she tames her materials (glass, metal, Plexiglas…) by testing their specific qualities (weight, flexibility, resistance, reaction to light) before considering how to transform, reconfigure and assemble them. Her sculptural installations, as ephemeral as they are adaptable, are so many direct responses to the spaces they occupy. Taut and fragile, the forms they draw create curves, reflections and depths that resonate with the void they inhabit.

Conceived specifically in response to the raw mineral quality of this surprising space, well suited to material experimentation, and whose metal mezzanine evokes the deck of a ship, the exhibition is an invitation to travel.

By stretching an immense net across the space, Léa Dumayet creates a sculpture as monumental as it is imperceptible, against which Marguerite Bornhauser's photographs collide. If the net catches the light (a good catch, to keep to the maritime vocabulary), it also lets it through. On the edge of abstraction, the doubled image becomes a suspended sculpture of light. So too the triptych of photographs printed on Plexiglas and hung beneath the mezzanine: flat, transparent surfaces that let the light pass through and cast coloured reflections. Through this dialogue between image and material, the photographs are to be appreciated as much for what they show as for the surfaces they create, and for the fantasies they stir. Further on, a frightening swarm of shark eggs invades a concrete cave and echoes the menacing scale of deep blue waves, evoking the abyssal depths suggested by a sound installation made from the very materials of the exhibition.

Water, the element at the heart of this exhibition, a shimmering surface that creates reflections but also lets light in while distorting it, then becomes a metaphor for the artist's practice, which absorbs, distorts and gives back reality through the singularity of her gaze."

Thomas Lapointe