Suzanne Lafont | New Companion Species: Offscreen 2022 | Hotel Salomon de Rothschild | Paris

Erna Hecey is delighted to participate with Suzanne Lafont's New Companion Species, 2018-2019 series in OFFSCREEN's inaugural event dedicated to large scale projects focused on fixed and moving images that transcend the classical art fair format by offering the experience of specially curated proposals in the beautiful vaste rooms of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, just a short distance away of Grand Palais.

 

Suzanne Lafont New Companion Species is a series of 16 fascinating photographs 160 x 106,7 cm each representing a plant collected, recorded and photographed between 2018-2019 in south-west France. Lafont reworked the chromatism by replacing certain colors by their complements, on a charcoal gray background. This lag of the chromatic spectrum, inverting values warm and cold on a dark background, produces a particular bewitching luminescence. This light dazzles and brings the eye to produce an afterimage, opposing values that are juxtaposed to the observed values, as described by Goethe in his Treatise on Colors. "Dazzling is Night in Broad Daylight", also says Michel Foucault in the History of Madness. This blurring of human vision evokes the disorganization of the vegetal world in our environment in a saturated atmosphere altered by Man, which has become "an unbreathable  garden”.

 

With special thanks to Bordeaux Metropole.

 

To see more: New Companion Species, 2018-2019