Pour voir la suite de l'article : http://canolinecritiks.blogspot.fr/2017/05/magali-lenonard-plume-fugitive.html
English version :
Magali Leonard, Fugitive Feathers
Every morning, the artist walks near an ornithological center in the Woods of Vincennes.
This rendezvous in communion with nature is a meditative and creative approach that allows her to reveal, through her photography, the transient passages on our landscape in a series entitled “The Sphere of Birds”.
With an ethereal realism, she takes note of curious anomalies, zooms in on tiny movements between sky and earth. Magali Leonard photographs in the moment, without staging, feathers of swans and other birds, which she happens to come across. The feather is an apparition which becomes the anchor, the aesthetic mark of the artist’s delicate, fleeting and aerial vision of nature.
The down of the feather is highlighted when exploring this world of black and white. This texture effect, without retouching or filters, focuses on the fold of white and that of light; themes that are dear to the artist.
Shadow and light, death and life, are at the fringes of the disturbing strangeness evoked by Freud, where the beautiful and the shapeless, the void and the full, the domestic and the foreign converse.
A torn wing reveals this balance of forces. The dramatic tension slides from the overall picture to the smaller details, which give meaning to the seemingly insignificant. A drop of rainwater, frost, a fly… are among the many details that draw the eye. From left to right, our gaze advances then turns back to probe the nature of the visible space more closely. This oscillation creates a distance from reality; between the possibilities of recognition and fictional associations.
“The Sphere of Birds” is presented on a roll of canvas, 8-meters long, resembling photographic film in large format. With neither beginning nor end, one is free to move around this imposing structure. Part of the work has been voluntarily left unrolled, hidden from the spectator, still to become. We are invited to imagine and “develop” the end of the film for ourselves. Five columns of photographs printed on aluminum accompany the rolled canvas.
In skillfully planned continuity, the ensemble’s dynamics reveal the afterimage. The feathers are in motion, always different, never captured in the same place. Under our gaze, each has a story to tell. They stir our senses in an exhibition space, the perfect backdrop for the further expansion and unfolding of their ever-changing tales. From one reality to another, though the passage of sight and touch, they lead us into a shared space.
Fugitive and almost dreamlike, Magali Leonard’s photographs generate the vague sensation of being in the presence of an elusive phenomenon. They provoke visual experiences with a fundamental link to Space and Time, with loss of reference as the central notion.
One is free to wander and lose oneself, cultivate one’s own interpretations, to follow the trace of a hidden meaning, while contemplating these natural, beautiful, enigmatic and poetic scenes.
