Above all, don't try to turn "to nature". You might as well try to cross the plane of the painting to eat the oysters that shine in the still life.
Bruno Latour, Face à Gaïa, La Découverte, 2015
Elegies
Text by: Fiona Morandini
Initiated in 2024, Élégies (I, Glaciers) is a soft and sensitive song dedicated to glaciers that makes us hear a feeling of loss and great melancholy. The glaciers are gradually disappearing – here and now – before our eyes: we are witnesses to their finiteness. Oscillating between fascination and fear, but also irony and derision, its melody, tones and vibrations fluctuate, intermingle and collide. In this work, Matthieu Gafsou subtly and delicately delivers his observations and feelings in the face of global warming and the state of the world.
Sillage I and Sillage II, show the traces of a glacier that has retreated. Dark, solemn and silent, they show the traces of this disappearance, like the triptych of glacial languages Langue I, Langue II and Langue III. These images are "places of memory"[1] testifying to the antiquity of glaciers that have been slowly retreating since the Little Ice Age. Virgin landscapes are made up almost exclusively of minerals at first glance, it is nevertheless possible to detect signs of plant life: after the ice, nature is organized, and the landscapes evolve. The silvery, sparkling surface of the pigment prints – which is perceptible in all the works in the series – invites the eye to wander and discover their contrasts, the details and reliefs they hide; it gives them a real depth and – paradoxically – a form of dazzling dynamism. This sense of loss and nostalgia is also felt in Dégel II, a portrait of a dazzling sun – or a full moon? – surrounded by undulating clouds. These ethereal and luminous clouds give a mystical, timeless and disturbing dimension to the image, which is reminiscent of the works of certain painters-meteorologists of the nineteenth century.
The powerful illumination that emanates from Sublimation I is as captivating as it is elusive, drawing the glacier that connects the lake to the sky. This brilliance also gives it an immaterial and timeless, almost divine dimension, which evokes aesthetics and the experience of the sublime and the grandiose. Between beauty and terror, we are witnesses to his imminent death. The installation Glaçage , made up of long curtains in bluish and white tones, simultaneously echoes the monumental, but also fragile and unstable character of glaciers. Depending on the natural light it lets in, the floating blocks of ice that make it up turn into fearsome and threatening rock masses.
This elusive, timeless and mutable aspect is found in the powerful illumination that emanates from the Oberaar glacier (Sublimation I) as well as in the triptych Fusion I, II and III. The three large photographs of blocks of ice taken at the Argentière glacier sparkle from afar. The size of their format and their brilliance give them a bewitching and hypnotizing character. These images are similar to celestial objects, nebulae – a mixture of gas clouds and interstellar dust – oscillating between the infinitely large and the infinitely small. The melting of the ice is visible through the presence of water droplets on the surface. The two states of water – solid and liquid – thus coexist on the triptych and suggest the imminent de-icing that inevitably echoes the urgency of the melting of the glaciers. But where do these drops come from? Are they an optical illusion or were they digitally designed? With these images, the photographer continues his plastic experiments with the very materiality of his own prints that he has moistened with water and hydrophobic product and then modified using digital tools.
Titlis Dream immerses us in prismatic man-made glacial caves that alternate from pink to blue. These fascinatingly vivid photographs were taken in the retro-futuristic-looking caves of the Titlis, a glacier that rises to an altitude of 3020m in the Engelberg region. Carved 20 metres underground, they arouse the admiration and amusement of tourists from all over the world and promise an unusual experience in the bowels of the glacier.
With its black smoke, Vaporisation I contrasts with the brilliance of the other photographs in the series. This thick cloud of smoke can be seen as an allegory, a sign of distress from the dying glacier. It can also echo the relationship of aggression and violence that humans have with glaciers. For this photograph taken in Aletsch, Matthieu Gafsou intervened directly in the landscape before the shooting. This image is disturbing, and he readily admits it. Through its remarkable pictorial dimension, which contrasts with the violent and profane act of throwing a smoke bomb on a glacier, it arouses strong emotions and feelings, leaving no room for indifference.
Some images are closer to documentary. It shows two tourists touching the Aletsch Glacier and others having fun and photographing themselves in the snow in Titlis. The lightness of gestures and behaviours echoes the ugliness of the high mountain landscape taken over by construction and construction machinery. Entitled The Pilgrims and Titlis Dream, they evoke on the one hand the sacred nature of the disappearing glacier and the tragic dimension of its death. They also refer to what is known as "last-chance tourism", a morbid phenomenon that consists of observing ecosystems that we know are potentially doomed to disappear in the medium term as a result of global changes. With cynicism and irony, the Alps, which were once associated with a return to ancient remains, are tragically depicted as landscaped environments that can be exploited ad infinitum[2].
It is the paradoxes of his artistic practice that the artist highlights in Trient, a video that takes us to the glacier via the river and the eponymous gorges. The devices used to make this film, a drone and a camera, act as guides through landscapes of dreamlike beauty. As it gets closer to the glacier, the drone's buzz amplifies in the exhibition space, until it becomes haunting. The pace of the video accelerates, the images pass quickly and are frantically superimposed. In this work, where fascination, degradation, the sublime and the trivial coexist, the artist questions his use of the drone, an object related to mass consumption and, by extension, to the practices he denounces and decries.
With Élégies, Matthieu Gafsou builds a critical and lively narrative that tries to make the rapid changes taking place in our Alpine landscapes tangible. He thus continues his work on the link between human beings and nature, initiated in his series Alpes (2009 – 2012) and extended in Vivants (2018-2022), this time placing the intimate at the heart of his discourse. By drawing on affect, whether in terms of content or form, the artist develops a relational artistic practice that aims to give an emotional and personal character to ecology. It encourages us to become aware of and to face global warming and the disasters it causes. The dramaturgical effects of his photographs give them a disturbing active form that allows us to grasp the richness of his practice and his technical mastery. Arousing strong emotions, the story he draws maintains a form of embarrassing tension, without however having a moralizing scope. By highlighting her own contradictions, the artist does not try to steer judgments but takes on the role of a catalyst that encourages everyone to find an individual resonance in each image. Elegies aims to help us rediscover a relational intimacy with our natural environments and with the living. It is an invitation to contemplation, exploration and introspective mobilization for a more sustainable and united future.
[1] Reichler, C., The Discovery of the Alps and the Question of Landscape, Geneva, Georg Editeur, 2002, p.19.
[2] MÉTROZ A., "Blanc carton", www.gafsou.ch/alpes [accessed on 8.07.2024]
Opening: Saturday 02 November 2024 from 5pm
Download the exhibition file: here
The exhibition is co-produced by La Ferme Asile and the Art for Glaciers association as part of the decentralised event Regarder le glacier s'en aller which took place during the summer of 2024 in Switzerland.
