The Galerie Nathalie Obadia is very pleased to hold a new solo exhibition by Luc Delahaye. On this occasion the photographer is presenting a set of ten works produced since 2011.
With these photographs, Luc Delahaye continues to reflect on the representations of the human condition in the contemporary world. With freedom and precision, he carries forward his pursuit of images that declare their autonomy while transcending their photographic nature.
This quest is above all the restless wandering of someone who, through his impersonal presence, aspires to an awareness of the world. Starting from theaters of war, it takes him towards a more ordinary reality: that of an Indian village, of a suburb of Athens or of a financial institution. It also prompts him to broaden his modus operandi: whereas the documentary approach remains central to his work, he is now also integrating certain artifices usually linked to fiction.
Thus, of the four photographs taken in the Indian village, two are classic documentary images taken directly from real life (Coal Gleaner, The Tree), another is the re-enactment of a scene witnessed during a previous visit (Father and Daughter), and the last (Boys Fighting) is the creation of an imaginary situation, using “actors”. Another example, in a very different domain, Trading Floor is a digital composition made from pictures taken at the London Metal Exchange. Death of a Mercenary and House to House, both made in Libya during the 2011 war, are more in the line of Luc Delahaye’s earlier works.
An exhibition is a moment in the career of an artist, it is one part of a whole in constant definition, and the variety of approaches and subjects shown here in just a few photographs probably represents a desire to cover the widest range of possibilities. Each of these new pictures, though, is stamped with the characteristic motifs of Luc Delahaye’s work, which invariably revolves around the dialectical interplay of false opposites: distant-present, archetypal-particular, beautiful-cruel, manifest-enigmatic. And the tableau, this image-object, is the place wherein these tensions are welcomed and contained.
