Philippe GRONON, 1991 - Lot 320

Philippe GRONON, 1991 Safe Deposit Box No. 7 at the Banque de France Edition 1/3 20 x 25 cm black-and-white silver print, mounted on aluminum. 47.5 x 60 cm Provenance: Private collection Since the early 1990s, Philippe Gronon (b. 1964) has been developing a body of photographic work whose starting point is the simplest, most historical definition of photography itself: that it is an image-making technique that records reality as it is. In Gronon's work, this is reflected in a well-established production protocol: almost all the objects photographed (amplifiers, safes, quotation tables, writing pads, lithographic stones, electric boards, painting versos, etc.) are on a 1:1 scale, so that the viewer is presented with the chosen motif in its most blatant, frontal truth. The way in which the artist renders it is also often exemplary of the realistic dimension of this recording of aspects of the world: the photographed object is often cut out, i.e. cropped, so that it can be seen as it is, from the front and unframed. The image is then the exact portrait of the subject, but flattened, without depth. Far from the staging of the body explored by recent plastic photography, far too from any idea of reportage linked to a documentary style, the photo here is as surgical and direct a survey of things as possible, of their pictoriality, which is what makes this art and the images that define it so singular, which are very often authentic paintings. A work of implacable and impeccable logic, a work of restraint, Philippe Gronon's art sumptuously demonstrates that there can be no such thing as reality as such, no absolute reality, and that it is by working as closely as possible to the (minute and intimate) distance between what is visible and what is photographed, between the object in reality and the object in the photograph, that the artist invents an art coefficient.