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Collection Maison Bernard, Fonds de dotation #03

Yves Gellie - Collection Maison Bernard, Fonds de dotation #03
The third title in a series of publications dedicated to artists' residencies at Maison Bernard, a masterpiece of organic architecture carried out in the 1970s by Antti Lovag in association with Pierre Bernard. The book documents a site-specific project by photograph Yves Gellie, a work on light and perception.
Yves Gellie is no stranger to Maison Bernard. His first visit, back in the 1980s, enabled him to meet its creators, Pierre Bernard and Antti Lovag. Coming regularly to see them, he gained an insight into the motivations and intentions of the former, and the innovative designs of the latter.
The first images Yves Gellie took are documents far removed from traditional architectural images. They affirm a deliberate bias in his avoidance of wide angles, as it is not a question of showing as much as possible but of suggesting, by focusing on the detail of the architectural elements to reveal the precision of the entangled forms, the fluidity of the perspectives and the patterns of the stone marquetry on the floor. And then he was caught in the game. In creating a veritable photographic studio in one of the rooms that brought together the full chromatic range used in the house, he was able to interpret and manipulate Antti Lovag's architecture to create autonomous images.
In a series entitled La Chambre Sœur [Sister Room], he made use of the specific properties of photography, in this case light, to reduce a three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional space, resulting in large flat areas of colour evoking an abstract composition and the raw material of a wall. Then seeking to recreate the transience of light in the spaces and how this influences our perception of them, he created a unique video installation by zooming in to the tiniest component of an image, the pixel. And pixel by pixel, he managed to reproduce the variations of light that the camera just could not capture.
His still and moving images are not representations, let alone demonstrations, of architecture. They faithfully translate the spirit of freedom that drove Antti Lovag and which he breathed into his architectural creations.
Yves Gellie (born 1953 in Bordeaux) is a French photographer. After medical studies at the University of Bordeaux, he practiced tropical medecine in Gabon for two years. In 1981, he began his career in photo-journalism with a feature about cocaine production in Colombia, followed by a story about war refugees in Ogaden, Somalia. He then became a specialist of the Middle-East, obtaining a World Press Award for a project on Oman in 1988, and the prize of the Society of Publication Designer's and the Merit Award in 2003 for his work on Saudi Arabia. His work being between photo-journalism and contemporary art, he has developed a style described as an iconographic selection of the reality underlying the day-to-day life and its trivial aspects.
Text by Thierry Ollat, interview with Yves Gellie by Isabelle Bernard.
 
published in March 2020
bilingual edition (English / French)
15 x 21 cm (softcover)
88 pages (color & b/w ill.)
 
22.00 11.00
(special offer)
 
ISBN : 978-2-35864-116-6
EAN : 9782358641166
 
in stock
Collection Maison Bernard, Fonds de dotation
Collection Maison Bernard, Fonds de dotation
Collection Maison Bernard, Fonds de dotation
Collection Maison Bernard, Fonds de dotation
Collection Maison Bernard, Fonds de dotation
Collection Maison Bernard, Fonds de dotation
Collection Maison Bernard, Fonds de dotation
Collection Maison Bernard, Fonds de dotation


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