This publication by the French artiste focuses on his work with color. It gathers a series of 41 photographs, along with texts by Claire Moulène and Mick Peters.
Julien Carreyn's exterior photographs explore France and the trouble it has negotiating its prestige, which is essentially connected to the past, and its aesthetic, which obeys criteria and tastes that we might suppose to be those of the middle classes. This is neither a critical approach nor a testimonial. It is more like an escape: a desire for spatio-temporal distance whose starting point might be a peri-urban area located on the edge of nothing. In this exploration, a half-empty car park or a hairdressing salon sign, submitted to certain aesthetic choices of framing and distance, become a Morandi-style composition (replacing the bottles, cones and funnels with Renault Méganes and Citroën Picassos) or a curious mixture of semiology and nostalgia. Certain images are printed in black and white on objects, perhaps postcard-size Perspex paperweights, while others undergo a process by which certain colours are masked, softened or removed (generally green and yellow), underlining the approach of the aesthete without denying the strange seductiveness that arises from the discreet charm of blandness. After these interventions, what proximity is left in the corpus in once again swept aside in favour of the law of the genre, in this case the nude, whose occasional appearance generates artifice and shifts all the images into the domain of staging and pure fiction.
vPublished on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Crèvecœur Gallery, Paris, from March 18 to May 14, 2018.
Born in 1973 in Angers,
Julien Carreyn lives and works in Paris.
