Art Trope Gallery presents the collective exhibition "Journeys : To the Edge of Reality" at Arles during the Arles Photography Encounters at La Résidence Arles from July 3rd to August 28th 2021

• 10 photographers from the gallery : Placement [66] at Arles Exhibitions.
• Collective exhibition including 40 works visible in a virtual gallery.
• Exhibition opening with the artists on Wednesday July 7th 2021, from 5 PM.

We have all had this feeling, this breath of freedom at the dawn of departure, this feeling that the journey will transform us forever. Christopher Columbus understood it the hard way: "We never go as far as when we don't know where we are going".

Art Trope Gallery is delighted to present its new exhibition named "Journeys: To the Edge of Reality" from July 3rd to August 28th 2021 in the Residence Arles located at 3 rue Elie Giraud in the heart of downtown Arles. It is a collective exhibition presenting the works of the Photographers of the Art Trope Gallery. It aims to highlight the importance of displacement and trajectory on the beings, places and materials of our environment. Our travels are the foundation of who we are.

The journey is a central place in the evolution of art history. It is a necessary quest whose iconography, real or imaginary, has fascinated us since time immemorial. Spiritual and spatial journeys, from one world to another, from a lived era to times remembered, traveling goes hand in hand with the knowledge that our adventure will bring us. Art has understood it well since the Egyptian ‘Book of the Dead’ to the industrial pictures of the Saint-Lazare station from Louis-Emile Durandelle, the Artist underlined these transitions which redefine, only better, the reality and the intentions of the individual. Throughout the ages, the quest for religion and the journey to the beyond has given way to the way we consume travel. The journey took a central place among artists who saw it as a way to access our deepest nature, to rediscover ourselves. Since the Middle Ages, the artist has this duty to transport his spectator. He opens doors to new horizons. Yet in a globalized world where travel is easier than ever, Art has undertaken a redefinition because of this new perspective to adventure. The surrealists began a journey towards our unconsciousness that the Contemporary Art now pursues towards a fragmented and questioned reality. We travel in time, in bodies, in nature and in practices to feel the reality of what surrounds us.

It is this process of sensation and creation of a unique point of view on ourselves that our Artists present. Their pictures are like a multitude of gates leading towards various destinations: journeys towards impossible or fantastic worlds who track our origins, in the discovery of another time and in meditation with the places which we transform as our adventures move forward. This is how, by its multitude of questioning, travelling fascinates: it has an infinite number of destinations for an infinite number of journeys, filling us with wonder at every part of our lives.

Arles is the perfect destination and meeting place for this message. It is this wonder that Art Trope Gallery want to share with the viewer here in our exhibition; this wonder that is hidden behind each eye, each camera, each photograph. The coastal geographical position of Arles encloses us and allows us for a moment to put aside the current global pandemic that no longer allows us to free our travel impulses. We therefore take advantage of this moment to escape through the most exploratory works of our artists.