“Empty streets, deserted beaches, foggy roads. Silhouettes of anonymous men, shadows. Cars at a standstill, flat tyres, folded umbrellas. Under the rain, in the crushing heat, a strange feeling of the end of the world circulates, suspended, through the images. [… ” These words by Pauline Alioua, introducing her series “Phantomatic// Nowhere to be seen 1”, capture the atmosphere of her universe, photographed in a highly cinematographic manner in pure, elegant black and white (silver), giving the present an air of eternity…
Born in 1986, the self-taught photographer, who now lives and works in Marseille, has already set her sights on the four corners of the globe, on bodies and landscapes, revealing intimate and existential questions in images, “oscillating between the real and the dreamlike [that] catch the eye with their narrative and poetic force”. In “Phantomatic”, it’s a kind of wandering, “a quest. Inner, outer” (sic) that we glimpse in the course of deserted or abandoned places: here, a close-up on the folds and undulations of a comforter, here, on those of a cliff, there, a beach of fine sand, here, a moor of scorched earth or two hats abandoned on the back deck of a car drenched by rain…They tell us of absence, the absence of the loved one after the breakup – “a world in shades of gray, stripped of the blinding colours of Love”. “The inner collapse opens up an empty space, a space […] that offers the possibility of seeing new things, of looking differently, of going elsewhere,” writes the artist herself.
Flirting as much with abstraction as with the absurd, her series X, the unknown plunges us into other empty spaces. The series began with images of empty road signs encountered on the roads of Bosnia and Hungary, abandoned signs that no longer indicate any destination, leaving the traveller to drive into the unknown… We see a rectangle of light covering a basement stairwell, another white rectangle painted on a wall, crossed lines – of wood, metal and smoke – and curved roads, a halo of light at the end of a tunnel, a suitcase abandoned on a road, silhouettes of men from behind appearing against the light, or an empty screen displaying the fateful “Image not found”. These are all images of “disquieting strangeness” (Freud), or rather, “disquiet[e] and intranquill[e]” (to refer, like the photographer, to the author of The Book of Intranquillity 2, Fernando Pessoa), conducive to the blossoming of poetry.
Crédits photos : © Pauline Alioua
- Série ayant donné lieu à la publication d’un livre disponible en ligne, sur le site de l’artiste, au prix de 20 €
- Pub. posth. 1982
Publications :
- Fragile (handle with care) de Pauline Alioua
LE BAL Books, 2023
20 €
- Tableaux d’Iran de Pauline Alioua et Chris Garvi
Arnaud Bizalion Editeur, 2021
45 €
arnaudbizalion.fr
@pauline.alioua