Jean-Claude Bélégou Sorrow : SORROW 2019/2020

 

 

I don't have a passion for the systematic practice of anglicisms in a certain milieu and the "save the date" of French artists or galleries leave me thinking... But it turns out that, just as Nevermore is the title of a poem by Verlaine, Sorrow is the title of a Gravue by Van Gogh and a painting by Edwad Munch...

Sorrow is not a series but a cycle of five series (Nordisches Licht, Morphologies, Aurores, Chiaroscuro, Vanitas vanitatum) of which only an excerpt is shown here.

Dark days when the light was spread from dawn to dusk enveloped raw flesh in a slow, insubstantial shroud, when time remained imperceptible and lifeless, when souls flew from an exhausted and tormented sleep. Dark dreams restless in vain, devoid of hope and future, waiting only for the death of an exhausted sorrow. Dark flesh without sympathy or warmth, scarcely warm and quivering yet, indifferent and insensible.

We only photograph bodies, appearances, materials, and even if the challenge, in my opinion, and my effort have always been to make photography a mental image, a "cosa mentale" capable of poetically accounting for feelings, subjectivity, ideas, sensations, that is to say, our only relationship to the world... In short, to take photography backwards from what it was first invented, and what remains its dominant purpose: to capture the only external appearance.

Where does the soul begin, where does the body end? Asks Flaubert in the wake of Spinoza. In any case, it is only by trying to define the bodies, the skin, the flesh as closely as possible that we can imagine approaching the souls
Always the same corner of the wall, the same bed, the same military blankets, the bodies under the light of the same window.

60 x 60 cm pigment inkjet prints made by the artist from digital photographs.