On the occasion of Paris Photo and Photodays, it is with pleasure that La Librairie des Arts du Royal Monceau – Raffles Paris invites the artist Claire Adelfang to exhibit a set of photographs dedicated to the Estate of Versailles and the Palais Garnier Opera.
Her photographic practice is recognizable in particular by the square format of her images and the frontality of her compositions. Passionate about behind the scenes – literally – of famous or unknown places and eager to reveal their unsuspected facets, the artist was authorized at the end of 2014/beginning of 2015 to explore these two prestigious places. She is currently pursuing her photographic work there.
The photographs of Claire Adelfang presented for this exhibition show all the theatricality of these two monuments. They could serve a classic but also contemporary staging playing on the spectacular and the intimate, the visible and the invisible and thus establish a dialogue. Her relationship with the modulation of light is also decisive in the construction of her images. In the context of the Estate of Versailles and the Palais Garnier, her photographic approach consists in revealing the “submerged” parts to then bring out all the magnificence of these buildings. Claire Adelfang strips away the strata of these places in some of her works. She captures a more buried and underground dimension to reveal, like archaeological images, their bases and their foundations while preserving their enigma.
The subject of each of her photographs is a fragment of reality, without artifice, a naked truth, of which she seeks an out-of-time and an off-screen which makes each image more abstract and, consequently, open to the imagination of each. “What interests me in the spaces that I photograph is this modification of the vision, this passage where the gaze changes to capture another reading of the place, one that is just waiting to be revealed. »
The “Correspondances” exhibition is an invitation to see beyond sensitive reality by revealing various imprints like so many different stories linked to these two emblematic and universal places.