"Making pictures"

Chuck Kelton & Laura Letinsky
in dialogue with
Jean-Pierre Sudre

Exhibition: 3 - 9 July, 2023
Opening: Monday, 3 July, from 5pm

Pop-up gallery @ Les Rencontres d'Arles
La Mercerie
12 Rue du Président Wilson
13200 Arles

www.galeriemiranda.com
enquiries@galeriemiranda.com

www.quandlesfleursnoussauvent.com
contact@quandlesfleursnoussauvent.com

For the opening week at Les Rencontres d'Arles this year, Galerie Miranda and gallery quand les fleurs nous sauvent present a group exhibition with works by two contemporary artists in dialogue with French artist Jean-Pierre Sudre (1921-1997) who was also one of the founders of the Rencontres d'Arles festival in the 1970s. Unique chemigrams by Chuck Kelton (b. 1952, USA) will dialogue with Sudre's experimental practice entitled "matière et végétale'; delicate, large format collage-inspired tableaux by Laura Letinsky (b. 1962, USA) from her series 'Ill Form and Void Full (2014, never shown in France) will dialogue with Sudre's still life photographs of flowers and bouquets, from the 1970s-80s.

Chuck Kelton (1952, American) makes unique, camera-less photographs, working in full daylight outside of the darkroom and spending weeks, sometimes months, sketching and preparing each work. A master printer, Kelton is also a passionate collector of photographs, practical manuals and tools from the history of photography. He explores 19th century techniques and chemistry such as gold chloride and selenium, that he combines with bleach and developer to coax a lush palette of colors from light sensitive, traditional silver gelatin papers. Describing his approach as "calligraphy with chemistry", Chuck Kelton combines chemigram and photogram techniques: the image in a photogram is the result of exposing photographic paper to light — writing with light — whereas the image in a chemigram is the outcome of exposing photographic paper to developer and fixer — writing with chemistry. Kelton often folds the paper in two - a transgressive act in photography - creating a visual break that is understood by the viewer as a horizon line creating depth of field in the artist's misty palette. Kelton’s works are evocative of other media such as watercolor, oil painting or charcoal drawing, and his glowing skies are reminiscent of Turner, Le Gray, Constable.

Chuck Kelton has been a master printer for over 35 years and has handled the work of artists such as Danny Lyon, Saul Leiter, Helen Levitt, Mary Ellen Mark, Larry Clark, and Lillian Bassman. Kelton's personal work has featured in numerous exhibitions and publications and is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Bibliothèque Nationale de France; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; International Center of Photography, New York; and New York Public Library. In 2020, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles acquired several of his works. The artist lives and works in Jersey City, NJ.

Chuck Kelton is represented by Galerie Miranda

Throughout her career, Laura Letinsky (1962, American) has engaged with the fundamental question of what precisely constitutes a photograph. Investigating photography’s relationship with reality, Letinsky began by photographing people but shifted to focusing almost exclusively on objects in the form of the still life. Her large-scale, carefully crafted scenes often focus on the remnants of a meal or party, as she plays with ideas about perception and the transformative qualities of the photograph. Her series Ill Form & Void Full (2010-2014), explores the tension between material and image, as Letinsky extracts elements from already existing imagery in magazines of food and domestic wares, calling attention to the constructed nature of all photographs.

Letinsky was born in 1962 in Winnipeg, Canada. She received her BFA from the University of Manitoba in 1986, and MFA from Yale University’s School of Art in 1991. Letinsky has held teaching positions at a number of prestigious American colleges, and since 1994 she has been a Professor in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Chicago. Public collections featuring Letinsky’s work include Art Institute of Chicago; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Art, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Yale University Art Gallery.

Laura Letinsky is presented in friendly collaboration Yancey Richardson Gallery

Jean-Pierre Sudre started out as a laboratory assistant and assistant reporter before turning to photography in 1949. It is at this time that he began photographing his first "sous-bois" and "natures mortes", that he called "silent lives". Working with contrasting, vibrant blacks and whites, he magnified everyday objects thanks to the "power of transposing colors into monochromatic tones" (in La photographie actuelle). He undertook broad experimentation with darkroom process, in particular the chemical process of mordanting, which fixes color dye to the support through a chemical process that gives a particular depth to the tones. Jean-Pierre Sudre describes himself as a poet. He metamorphoses objects through a photography of detail where the anecdotal becomes the essence of the subject. This quest is felt in various series from his "natures mortes” to his later "M+V" [mineral + vegetal] series:

"For the M+V series, having photographed a lot of the plant world [...], I approached things from within this mystery of nature, at the foot of trees, mosses...it was a travelling shot of these very things on which we walk and which are of a great beauty" --- Jean-Pierre Sudre to Jean-Claude Gautrand in an interview for the MEP in 1994.

His work has won numerous awards, including the Golden Lion at the International Biennale of Photography in Venice in 1957. He participated in the creation of the festival Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles, and was promoted to Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1997.

Jean-Pierre Sudre is represented by quand les fleurs nous sauvent