THE HEALER (english)
THE HEALER /// LE GUERISSEUR (2002-2008, in Copenhagen, Denmark)
The exhibition contains 20 images in 50×70 cm or 30×45 cm formats, accompanied by a slideshow projection of 50 diptyches.
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| CLICK HERE to see THE HEALER /// LE GUÉRISSEUR (série photographique) |
Of French origin, JM Babonneau (b. 1971) takes us through his solitary wandering in the capital of Denmark – Copenhagen, a European city that he has been living in for the last five years. 50 diptyches were culled from an image bank of 50,000 photographs; the result is a polymorphic visual diary where documentary images become fictionalized under the form of diptychal dialogues, blurring the boundary between hyper-constructed images and snapshots.
Photographer, but also storyteller and maker of photographic image books, his series THE HEALER /// LE GUÉRISSEUR is a work of immersion in the strangeness and lyricism of his interior world and external world. It is also a quest for beauty in fortuitous meetings, furtive visions fished in the trivialities of his daily cultural aquarium.
We find juxtapositions such as the end of a tunnel against a coffee mug full of stain, two abandoned wine glasses on the beach against a little girl in water who raises her arms to the sky, a friend photographed in a hospital during her treatment for psoriasis against a boiled egg and its shell in broken pieces spread on top of a magazine cover, an advertisement showing a young blond woman spreading her legs apart against a poster of a smiling old couple supporting the extreme-right party in Denmark, vehicles for three generations against a curb rolled over by a wheel trace, a fashion magazine cover with the eyes and nose cut out against the missing pieces next to a sharp knife, a notebook computer screen showing a nightscape lit by streetlights against a blurry and screaming ghost figure, referring to the Scream of Munch, a hand holding a Nazi postal stamp against a rubbish dump full of metallic waste …
Photographers like Robert Frank, Wolfgang Tillmans and Jim Dine have inspired his vision through their daring, non-academic formal freedom, pushing and developing his art towards a direction that departs from the heritage of the influential Düsseldorf school, where the Bechers, for example, preached an extreme systematicism through their documentary photographic work. Authors like Henry Miller, Paolo Coelho and Milan Kundera have contributed to his understanding of the vital importance for the artist to cultivate the originality of his viewpoint.
The Healer epitomizes the ambiguity that is characteristic to Denmark, a result of dichotomic clash between the minimalist-Protestant sobriety of the North and the flamboyant-Catholic exuberance of the South. His work, under the alias Better_World_Inc., is an attempt at reconciliation between the autochthon and the foreigner, the professional and the amateur, the photographer as artist and the photographer as a man.
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