Songeries végétales

Patrick Tosani’s La Pluie Seule and La Pluie Barrée belong to the Écriture de Pluie series. Rain becomes a photographic model in its own right. The downpour forms a curtain through which the onlooker can never pass. Playing with scale, Tosani includes the onlooker’s body itself as a physical element of the picture, enabling him to perceive what he would be unable to see under normal circumstances.

Borderland is a series of photographs taken in the countryside by Tania Mouraud. Looking through the windows of a car, she fixes her attention on bales of hay wrapped in plastic, upon which the features of the surrounding landscape are reflected. “In close-up, as near as possible to the reflecting surfaces provided by each bale, she frames abstract “canvases”. The photographs record subtle variations in colour that depend on the creases in and stretch of the plastic – the white of the clouds extends into the blue of the sky, the green of the grasslands blends into the brown of the earth. Occasionally, entirely yellow or green swathes of plastic are transformed into bronze sculpture. In the material elements of painting – colour, touch and flat surfaces – her works find sufficient means to achieve their goal: the re-creation of light. The subject is nothing more than a pretext for producing effects in light.”

Jean-Luc Moulène uses photography as a tool for studying natural and cultural phenomena as they have been redefined by the development of industry, the media, and trade. He highlights the gap between tool and imagination in order to produce real poetic alternatives.

Jean-Luc Moulène has a degree in plastic arts and art sciences (Université de la Sorbonne, 1979) and lives in Paris. His work has been exhibited in many French institutions, including Musée du Louvre, Jeu de Paume, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC and Carré d’Art-Musée d’Art Contemporain in Nîmes, as well as at the Culturgest in Lisbon, the C/O in Berlin, the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva and the Center for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu (Japan). In Paris, he is represented by the Chantal Crousel Gallery, and in London by the Thomas Dane Gallery. His latest catalogue was published by Walther König Verlag in autumn 2009.

Born in 1954, Patrick Tosani lives and works in Paris. After studying architecture, he developed his own style as a photographer, in which questions of scale and space are of central concern. The photographic process, its potential and its limits, and its relation to the real world are constantly called into question through series devoted to objects, to the body, to clothes, etc. He won the 1993 Kodak Critics Prize and the 1997 Niépc Prize, and has taught at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris since 2004.

Tania Mouraud is born in Paris in 1942. Her work takes many very different forms while remaining founded upon genuine social commitment and ontological questioning, awakening onlookers’ consciousness of themselves and of the world around them. She is self-taught and began her artistic career at a very early age, with her Initiation Rooms, areas devoted to introspection. In the 1970s, she began mixing art with philosophy in work initially based on words, and developed her own photographic approach. She created her first videos in the late 1990s, before turning her attention to the world of sound. After performing live with the group Unité de Production, which she founded in 2002, she now performs solo. Her recent video installations, whose visual power is further enhanced by sound, mark a fresh turning-point in her career. Tania Mouraud was named Knight of the National Order of Merit in 2009.