NOTHING RESISTS THE SUN
Curator: Oliver Schefer
March 14th - April 1st 2022 -
March 28th - March 31st 2022 - Sustainable Development Week at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Nothing Resists the Sun
Rien ne résiste au soleil
It is precious to listen to an artist talk about her work, especially when something escapes her, leaks into the margins, closes in on a thin border. Laure Tiberghien's practice hesitates between technical mastery in the laboratory (no direct shots in her home) and attention to the emergence of accidental events, what she calls "leaks". The artist inscribes her artistic practice in the history of photography without a camera - August Strindberg's celestographies, the cyanotypes of the botanist Anna Atkins -, she is also close to pictorial monochrome and certain painters of the Champ Coloré, one often thinks here of Mark Rothko's paintings. Laure Tiberghien came to photography through her pictorial practice, working in the darkness of her studio to reveal luminous horizons on the sensitive paper she manipulates with pieces of colored gelatin.
This is how she observed the green border surrounding some of her productions. Like the imperceptible frame of a Sam Francis canvas, these thin colored lines - a chance of her experiments - intrigue her gaze from the start. What is there to see here? The artist calls this ray "ray", in memory of the green ray: the last glow of the sun as it sets, which appears when certain atmospheric conditions are favorable. This green ray, which was first described by navigators, has haunted literature, from Jules Verne to Blaise Cendrars, as well as the cinema and the visual arts. It is both real and imaginary. A green flash, as the English say, which lasts a quarter of a second. Its reality is almost mythical, the green ray is a true utopia, a dream of light that few of us have really seen.
Laure Tiberghien seizes it to photograph an imaginary line, that of an unreal and continuous horizon that is as much to be seen as to be apprehended in the course of the Sorbonne gallery. It is as if the artist were telling us that we cannot perceive a horizon if we do not physically experience it, that of a landscape to be traversed and experienced. The invisible world stands at the edge of the real world, just as the horizon line moves away as we approach it.
Nothing resists the sun: the power of the major star within the darkness. Laure Tiberghien's photographs open up the promise of an unknown path in the thick black of the paper. Her green line reminds us of those hypnotic roads that pass by at night under the headlights of a car and that we perceive in a second state, between the day before and the dream.
Artist's Biography:
A 2016 graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, Laure Tiberghien lives and works in Paris. In 2017, she was invited by Françoise Paviot and held her first solo exhibition, La Société Lumière, at the Espace Van Gogh in Arles. In 2018 she leaves for a residency in the Agafay desert, at La Pause Residency. That same year she will be invited by the artist Eric Poitevin to exhibit at ArTsenal, the art center of the city of Dreux with six other artists. In February 2019 the Lumière des Roses gallery invites her for a solo exhibition. She is co-winner of the Louis Roederer Discovery Prize of the Rencontre d'Arles in July 2019. Following this, she enters the collections of the Rencontres d'Arles and then those of the French Museum of Photography. In 2020 she will participate in the exhibition of the Centre Photographique d'Ile de France and the FRAC Normandie, La photographie à l'épreuve de l'abstraction. The Centre Pompidou acquired three of her works that same year. Laure Tiberghien explores the limits of the photographic medium by questioning its two fundamental elements, light and time. She also works with the moving image in correlation with the still image. Using these elements, she creates photographic or filmic objects that are non-reproducible and therefore unique.
