Artist
Marc-Antoine Garnier
Marc-Antoine Garnier (b. 1989) is a French photographer and visual artist, who graduated from the Ecole Supérieure d’art et Design Le Havre-Rouen. In recent years, he has presented his works in numerous exhibitions. His pieces have been collected by the FRAC Normandie-Rouen, as well as several art libraries in France. Garnier’s research finds particular appreciation in Japan, where he exhibited at the Nishieda Foundation as part of the Nuit Blanche de Kyoto in 2017, and at the Tezukayama Gallery in 2016.
Project: Marc-Antoine Garnier
Through landscape images of vegetation, mountains and skies, my work explores the materiality of the image through various manipulations of photographs. By way of rolling, crumpling, cutting, punching, blurring and folding paper, I attempt to establish a dialogue between content and form. The project sets traps for the gaze, hollowing out details and playing with perspective. It’s an experience that engages the viewer’s entire body; photographs come out of the frame, detaching themselves from the wall into a space in which they evolve. It’s the displacement of the spectator that activates the entanglement of the image – in all its reliefs and volumes.
Arno Brignon, for instance, utilises outdated analogue films – products of a past industry – and in doing so entrusts his photographic act to the erosion of the film, leaving room for the work of time. Damien Caccia thwarts the permanence of the photographic medium by the systematic alteration of the recorded image, in experimental works created with the aid of tools such a portable scanner. Marc-Antoine Garnier probes the two dimensional nature of the photograph, asking ‘Is it photography?’ while folding, assembling, piercing and brading paper, pushing our understanding of surfaces into new realms. And finally, in Nina Medioni’s work, the relationship between the photographed and the photographer is constantly reassessed, with the camera becoming a tool to record the people she encounters and the territories through which she passes.