Jean-Luc Tartarin

Born in 1951 in Metz (FR)
Lives and works in Metz (FR)

Sans titre

1970
Black and white photograph, gelatin-silver print
25,7 x 38,7 cm
Year of Purchase: 1989

Jean-Luc Tartarin’s photographic praxis strives to capture and define the essence of things – their nub – be the subject a human being, or a simple aspect of our everyday life, or even a landscape transfigured by a special light. These various ‘portraits’ are large-format works which thus lend the image an autonomy akin to that of the picture (the image is enclosed, it is self-justifying, and seems devoid of anything off-screen). But these recent works derive their sources from the black-and-white experiments conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, several significant examples of which are in the collection. Thus the forest photographs which he took in the late 1980s or thereabouts attest to a determination not to give in to picturesqueness, but on the contrary to reinstate the whole symbolic charge of this particular place. The forest, in history and the western imagination, remains the place of pagan deities and myths, the mysterious place, vaguely disconcerting, where certain of the most primitive and (fundamental) beliefs of our imagination are still rooted. This is what is suggested in these images by the interweave of branches from which a shrewdly and cannily worked light emerges. Likewise, older portraits play with this tension between the real and the imaginary, but, this time around, faced with the impossibility of delimiting the inner reality of the subject. Since then, Jean-Luc Tartarin has opened his work up to colour and objectivity.

^{Damien Sausset}