ANNE-CHARLOTTE FINEL | Des sirènes au fond des prunelles

Address : Centre d'art Le Lait | 28 rue Rochegude, 81000 Albi, France

Day/night, nature/culture, arti­fi­cial/natu­ral… We might thus list the many dicho­to­mies which inform the work of Anne-Charlotte Finel (born in 1986, lives and works in Paris). But her works are well-remo­ved from binary and head-on confron­ta­tions, and play, on the contrary, with subtle varia­tions and tiny move­ments which are at times barely per­cep­ti­ble, and lend her oeuvre its rich unu­sual­ness.

Whether she is fil­ming those tran­si­tory spaces, on the outs­kirts of cities, where mother nature seems to have reclai­med her rights, whe­ther she is inte­res­ted in impres­sive forms of archi­tec­ture spark­ling in the night, or clo­sely obser­ving natu­ral and scien­ti­fic phe­no­mena, Anne-Charlotte Finel always mana­ges to trans­cend the images she cat­ches. Far from any remote and scien­ti­fic obser­va­tion, the unu­sual­ness of her approach resi­des in the poetry with which she infu­ses her works. This per­ma­nent shift, this infi­ni­te­si­mal alte­ra­tion of our view­points, and this way of revea­ling the inex­pres­si­ble cons­ti­tute the whole inte­rest of her work. Starting from see­min­gly com­mon­place situa­tions, she mana­ges to “em­bark” us in her cre­pus­cu­lar world, on the edge of places and phe­no­mena which cannot be imme­dia­tely gras­ped, and require time to unders­tand what we are being shown. The images she cap­tu­res thus become nothing less than “en­vi­ron­ments”, hard to iden­tify, whe­ther they are micro­sco­pic— when she focu­ses on the growth of living orga­nisms such as sea­weed or the result of che­mi­cal pro­ces­ses—or, conver­sely, exag­ge­ra­ted and dis­pro­por­tio­nate, when she is faced with large indus­trial com­plexes.

Without top­pling over into abs­trac­tion—­some of her videos inci­den­tally, help to under­pin an embryo­nic nar­ra­tive—, Anne-Charlotte Finel intro­du­ces a sen­si­tive and sen­so­rial rela­tion to her work, which some­ti­mes takes us to the outer limits of our ima­gi­na­tion. This sen­sa­tion of being caught up in and absor­bed by the work ori­gi­na­tes in her way of fil­ming. By pushing tech­ni­que to its limits, she mana­ges to lend a real mate­rial qua­lity to the images, to the point, at times, of let­ting motifs, tex­tu­res and pat­terns appear. The artist also pays close atten­tion to the sound­tracks accom­pa­nying her films. She has thus been wor­king for seve­ral years with the musi­cian Luc Kheradmand on crea­ting sound layers which unders­core the dra­ma­tic nature of the ima­gery.

If the exhi­bi­tion in Albi adds to the conti­nuity of her pre­vious shows, we should empha­size that Anne-Charlotte Finel has recently been sta­king out new ter­ri­to­ries, still unex­plo­red for her, that today form the basis of a new output. She recently enjoyed a resi­dency on the island of Molène, where she confron­ted the marine eco­sys­tem pecu­liar to this island off the coast of Finistere.

Photos : Phoebe Meyer

Vernissage : 05/07/2019 6:30 pm

Curator : Antoine Marchand