In two exhibitions, one in color, the other in black and white, the artist presents works that hold photography, performance and video.
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Noémie Goudal exhibits simultaneously at the meetings of the photography of Arles (Bouches-du-Rhône), alone in the vast church of the Trinitarians, and, on the other hand, at the Château d’Oiron (Deux-Sèvres), in The collective exhibition “The horizon of events”. In both cases, the artist, born in 1984 in Paris and a graduate of the Royal College of London in 2010, presents very recent work that takes photography, performance and video – in color in Arles, in black and white in Oiron. And, in both cases again, the perception goes from the primary uncertainty to a better understanding of what the eye sees, then, it acquired, towards increasingly worried reflections.
The projected image, in large format, is first of all that of a landscape, in the exuberant genre, with beautiful trees and large fins. It looks like an advertising for tour operator or a cover of tourism magazine. But, in a barely noticeable way, this image begins to move. Either a tree sinks slowly into the water as if it was flowing vertically, or a slight smoke appears, followed by flames which begin to destroy the leaves – an image of foliage in fact. But behind it, a second appears, which in turn ignites and reveals a third.
cyclic process
When this process of destruction ends, there are only the frames to which these photographic prints were suspended and the “real” landscape: a wasteland which could be a vestige of aviation land or a sand floor and A blind wall. This is the case in Oiron and in one of the videos shown in Arles. In the second, less disconcerting, the images of trees, run by cables, slide in a pond, then come out, cyclic process accompanied by bird songs. At the same series, Phoenix, which gives its name to the Arles exhibition, belong to prints of the same patterns cut into vertical or horizontal tapes disjointes, like collages which would have been poorly executed and would reveal their falsity of mental images.
This is the first interpretation that proposes to the work of Noémie Goudal, as it has built it for a decade. It would be an ironic staging of the artifices of the photographic representation, which we know how deceived it can be. Goudal would show that these lush landscapes are only ghosts of paper and that there is nothing that is a dreary and without quality reality. The complex technical devices that the artist invents and mastery would have no other end than this cruel self-destruction of photography.