CRITICISM – The Aix museum has given carte blanche to the photographer to recompose his trip to the Eternal City, in the footsteps of François Marius Granet.
There is nothing baroque about the discreet Bernard Plossu, a photographer without aesthetic overbidding to whom the Aix museum has given carte blanche. He drew on his work, produced from 1979 to 2017, to recompose a journey in the footsteps of Granet in Tuscany, on the Genoese coast and finally in Rome. On the picture rails which alternate between prints, mostly unpublished and in black and white, and black or sepia ink wash extracted from the painter’s notebooks, the motifs are often the same. And equally intense love.
Here are venerable but anonymous walls, angles of roofs or stairs drawing harmonious lines, stretching shadows as with de Chirico, and playing with the textures of their material. And again: here are half-open shutters, crooked steeples, a neglected mosaic, scattered fragments. Up to a medieval tower as if caged in a construction fence. Until a tram that passes in front of a pyramid, like at Pasolini. These motifs are the result of once grandiose constructions…
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