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Sans titre
1988
Black and white photograph, gelatin-silver print
40 x 30 cm
Purchased in: 1990
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Yves Guillot is a photographer of the fading and fragility of appearances. He casts his eye into the world about him without letting the clearly caught form of beings and things become fixed on the film. His photographs keep bodies and faces behind panes of glass, simple passing shadows, setting off towards somewhere else. They conjure up the evanescence of the image, and its flight beyond the restriction of the frame.
Objects alone are lent this precise and simple presence which makes it possible to recognize a place, and a moment, for a split second. However, as witnesses of a life which is forever in motion, their reflections are swiftly exhausted and in the end retain no exact shape. Guillot’s photos freeze things close to, but in the indeterminancy and greyness of oblivion become tangible through the size of the grain, the blurredness of the outlines and the chromatic depth of the prints.
His approach, which is atypical of present-day artwork, in no way relies on the specificity of the photographic eye and its ability to construct an image. Rather, it explores the exhaustion of the eye, and its powerlessness to store and record all the information transmitted by reality. His contribution to a history of ways of looking at things is encapsulated in a book and a series: ten years of research in fifteen pictures. As a metaphor of movement incorporated in the enigma of the passerby, The Landlady is a journey which starts through a keyhole and ends on a doorstep at the foot of this dog dreaming of the return of man: ‘happy he who like Ulysses…’
Guillot’s photographs capture simple moments, dominated by boredom and attacks of amnesia.
Maïté Vissault
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