Jacques Garnier | A Deconstructed Odyssey

JA CQU ES G A RNI E R

A DECONSTRUCTED ODYSSEY

DROPPING ASSUMPTIONS Is “abstract photography” the right description for Jacques Garnier’s recent body of work in his series A Deconstructed Odyssey? On one hand, if Garnier’s work is considered within the context of photography, his abstractions evoke a lineage of László Moholy-Nagy, Aaron Siskind, Barbara Kasten, Fan Ho, Minor White, Uta Barth and many others in the 20th century. But if considered in the context of painting, his work evokes a lineage of Barnett Newman, Frank Kline, and John McLaughlin. In any of these cases, when it comes to abstraction, artists, historians, and critics could say that either photography and/or painting is dead because the mediums themselves are even less of a reference when an image’s qualities are the focus, but that’s only when you care about categories and the reinforcement of defined characteristics that are being challenged.

So, I want to say that perhaps the best phrasing is “abstract imagery.” To my eyes, Garnier has dropped the assumptions of what is a photograph, what is representational, what is abstract. He just makes images. Their sources are building facades. The results could then be described as fragments out of context yet, I feel, that referencing the environment from which they originated does not matter anymore in Garnier’s artistic territory. Rather, he concentrates on the Zen-like poetics of hard-edge, geometric shapes formed by an admixture of existing architecture, light, and shadow, which are enhanced in the digital darkroom. They are meant for consideration within their own context now. However, on occasion, there is a hint of “the real,” such as vestigial windows; a curtain even making an apperance now and again. Their elusive announcements strike a humurous tone for me, though as if making fun of the past assumptions we’ve made about those indexical qualities

of a photograph. But, such observations do not even matter when transcending classifications. This is the result, when all that you care about is making an image, which I believe, is Jacques Garnier’s penchant as an artist who fuses and challenges the nature of photography and painting at once.

Tyler Stallings, 2018 Director, Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion, Orange Coast College

FRAGMENTS You can lose your way easily in Jacques Garnier’s latest series of manipulated black and white photographs. Consisting of various architectural facades stripped of most of their identifying details - some down to just rows of windows, others to rectangles and a fire hydrant - the artist leaves you to sort your way through the unfamiliar territory, stumbling and waving your hands about in the darkness.

By reducing surfaces to shapes and lines and negative spaces, the whitewash of cluttered exteriors to the images of abstracted geometry are the artist’s attempt to redesign the world around him. A hopeful plea for something better, something simpler, it’s also a nod and a smile acknowledging that you may have to close your eyes to part of it for that to happen. Most importantly, the work reveals Garnier’s unique ability to lay bare the soul trapped inside empty space.

As deserted as his photographed places might seem, the pictures teem with the energy of absent life. Some windows look like cellblock towers, others have balconies stacked on top of each other, sandwiches of pristine monotony interrupted by towels hanging on railings, or strips of privacy screen stretched across them like grinning black maws. Glass bounces reflections of tree trunks and vegetation from outside.

Sometimes what’s inside shines through: overhead lighting, blinds, shades, and lonely hallways.

Photography is the art of the here and now, with the person behind the camera choosing what not to show, as much as they are choosing what to show. By controlling and stilling the choas and the clutter facing him, Garnier creates an alternative

environment that didn’t exist previously. One of silence in a world that often feels like a twenty-four-hour bad news cycle.

Like purging a bookshelf or cleaning out a crowded garage, we constantly condense and retrench throughout life, simplifying until only the things we love remain. It’s something that happens to all of us as we get older: less tolerance for what clutters everyday life. As the years pass, it’s one of the few things that we have control over.

Eventually we have to let go of even what we love, whether it’s people, memories, or creative energy.

Garnier’s completely abstracted images continue playing with the idea of disapperance, offices and apartments reduced to repetitive lines and squares, as if we’re looking at a closeup of a computer chip, or a stripped-down punk rock graphic. A lone guard rail may give context, but that identifying anomaly isn’t the norm. The strict regimentation of black and white photography offers the work a complex yin/yang tension, exacerbating whatever unease we may experience as we struggle to sort out exactly what it is that we’re looking at. Garnier makes the viewer work to sort through his images, ponder what you’re seeing and ask yourself what’s missing.

What is left at the end is fragments, and Garnier’s distillations of love and loss remind us to take heed and pay attention, even change, while we still have the time.

Dave Barton, May 2018 Dave Barton has written extensively about art, theatre, and politics for the past twenty years, in a variety of newspapers and magazines. He has been the OC WEEKLY art critic since 2009.

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AFTERWORD With the almost exponential acceleration of time and seemingly endless stream of daily distractions, there comes a renewed vigor to embrace life, to see through its complexities, its noise if you will, and seek its essence. This has led me to investigate the politics of space by eliminating the irrelevant and stilling the chaos. Influenced by the reductive palette of minimalism, the purity of negative space and the geometric patterns of Brutish architecture these images explore the relationship between balance and the stillness that it creates. By deconstructing these buildings, by eliminating the unnecessary clutter and urged on by their now stronger graphic elements, critical relationships are revealed which give the photograph a new coherence.

It starts with finding a style of architecture, a building that seems to have patterns that can be deconstructed, that can be re-composed to create a new reality, a new way of seeing that is freed from many of the trappings of the increasingly chaotic world in which we live. This dance between the object as it was and what it has now become, a dance between the real and the abstract, is for me pure magic. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has said “A [photographer] knows he has reached perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Jacques Garnier, 2018

T H I S CATA LO G U E H A S B E E N P U B L I S H E D O N T H E O C CA S I O N O F T H E E X H I B I T I O N

JACQUES GARNIER | A DECONSTRUCTED ODYSSEY 2018

D E S I G N : M A D E L I N E LO O M I S & J AC Q U E S G A R N I E R T E X T : T Y L E R STA L L I N G S & DAV E B A R TO N C O P Y R I G H T : J AC Q U E S G A R N I E R