Paysage sur route 40-2020, 2020

Aline Isoard  

During the inevitable almost daily trips to leave my village in the Alps, I have kept from my childhood the memory of this game which consists in accommodating the sharpness of the gaze on the different plans of the landscapes. Thus was formed part of the DNA imprint of my work.

When I let myself be driven, the vehicle with its multiple openings / windows becomes my transparent mobile studio placed on giant tracking shots, turned towards the carried away transported life that comes to terms with the unforeseen, the irrational and sometimes the absurd. From this restricted space, my snapshots taken on the fly fix moments of this feverish space-time as witnesses of fleeting memories of a public space in our collective memory.

In front of my photographs, it is possible to observe the manual work on the surface of the paper, balance between the printed image and the unique restored image. No addition, no gluing, no editing. In the pigment layer, repentance of tools, dirt, traces of gestures are visible. If however my interventions can evoke the register of drawing, they also modify the colors and materials of the pigment ink. This process of photographic depigmentation strips the epidermis of the photographic paper of its pigment to enrich it with the white of its soul which can in turn be light, color, space. In the stability of the square format, I simplify, sort, oppose, architecture. The slow work of the plastic surgeon erases the anecdotal elements and merges with the given snapshot.

Each image belongs to a series exploiting the various forms of detail: cuts in the landscape, images in the image created by reflections or from the undersides of decks, parts, bodies or objects, seen inside the passenger compartments , the out-of-view of the truck cab, the all-over produced by the cleaning brushes but also the fragmentation and enlargements of the print itself.

Before working on photographic paper in this way, I made for several years, abstract sculptures in painted glass sheets or scratched mirrors, playing with the freedom offered to painting to be in space, without frame, without background. . The mirror plots and their reflections brought moving images. I then added fragments of my printed images as still images coming back to the practice of photography.

Thus, by working in volume and in plan, the photograph has revealed itself to be composed of materials whose action of depigmenting deflects the realistic origins of the image and opens the image on the disorder between illusion and intention. .