Roselyne Titaud Reversible / Irreversible 17 November 2010 - 28 January 2011 Un voyageur peut toujours revenir sur ses pas. Mais sur l'axe du temps, il n'y a pas de retour en arrière Vladimir Jankélévich Un viatger pot sempre tornar sobre les seves passes. Però sobre l'eix del temps, no hi ha retorn enrere. Vladimir Jankélévich The Fundació Vallpalou is delighted to invite you to the opening of the Roselyne Titaud: Reversible / Irreversible exhibition on 17 November at 8PM at the Foundation’s Headquarters at 2 carrer Roger de Llúria, Lleida. The exhibition will last from 17 November 2010 to 28 January 2011, open Tuesday - Friday from 4PM to 8PM. La Fundació Vallpalou es complau a convidar-vos a la inauguració de l’exposició Roselyne Titaud: Reversible / Irreversible, que tindrà lloc el proper dimecres 17 de novembre a les 20h a la seu de la Fundació, carrer Roger de Llúria, 2, baixos de Lleida. L’exposició es podrà visitar del 17 de novembre de 2010 al 28 de gener de 2011, de dimarts a divendres de les 16 a les 20 hores. La Fundación Vallpalou se complace en invitarles a la inauguración de la exposición Roselyne Titaud: Reversible / Irreversible, que tendrá lugar el próximo miércoles 17 de noviembre a las 20h en la sede de la Fundación, calle Roger de Llúria, 2, bajos de Lleida. La exposición se podrá visitar del 17 de noviembre de 2010 al 28 de enero de 2011, de martes a viernes de las 16 a las 20 horas. In a Labyrinth of Fictions
By Kaiwan Mehta

The photographs of Roselyne Titaud collect the home for us. The home for all practical purposes is the site where the relationships and rituals of a family are enacted, performed, constructed and lived. Titaud changes this for us in the way she constructs the corners of living spaces in her photographs. In a way, she brings home to us the facts of the home. The phenomenology of home as concrete space, or as the site of and for a particular experience, is embodied in the sets of objects that linger on in the physical space. The lingering object, and essentially the orchestrated play of these lingering objects, form the crux of our experience of home and family.

As light filters through the lace curtain and evenly fills the room, the pavilion with trees as references to a distant oriental or Dutch landscape animates the space. The view inside the room begins to complete a picture with the lace table-cloth and its geometric-floral patterns with fruit bowls, walnuts in a wooden platter, painted pottery, and classic teakwood and leather chairs, along with a curtain with black streaks as if on the coat of a tiger. There is also the mosaic-finish on the walls. On another occasion one sees the view inside the room where you have a settee with a velvet cover of brown background with orange maple leaves, a blue hand-rest, a plain brown back, a red, black and white patterned cushion-cover, a landscape poster, a glass shelf bracket with a lace cloth on it, holding a vase containing red and yellow plastic flowers, an empty cylindrical vase, and a curio.

In every picture that Titaud frames there is a dual act – one, where the objects come together as if it were the most obvious thing for them to be there, making up the space of home and living, carefully accumulated or brought together in that organized and choreographed manner by many moments of chance ; but on another note the individual-ness and the unrelated-ness of one object in this collage with the other/s is apparent. This coming together of two opposite understandings in the same perspective is the crucial aspect of Titaud’s photographs. As much as the sentimentality of living in a home and its projection of a family are contained in these pictures, they also deconstruct the image and formula of that space of emotion which is constructed by random objects and their shared memories.

The home is defined against that which is supposedly outside it, i.e. the space of the world outside – the space of work, play, market, etc – that which is public. Often the space of the home then becomes an endeavor to reconstruct that outside world inside the confined physical limit of the house or apartment. This is a world that contains not only ourselves but other selves from the world, who or which are now domesticated as against the uncertain, unpredictable and ambiguous nature of these very objects in the ‘wild’ world outside. It also becomes a space for reconstructing reminiscences and denials – what of the world one wishes to recollect and hold inside the house as the holder of desire or fear. The home is then the haven, a kind of doll house that can be filled with objects that seem to have a clear form and purpose, but contain hidden narratives of the home that posses it. These objects are allegories of those who compose them. Titaud’s photographs capture precisely these allegories. Rather than operating as a photographer, she performs an act of magic, like the fantastic crystal-ball reader of the ‘east’, to capture, in this case, the narrative of home and life.

Her photographs have no human beings, but their performances and their actions are so strongly present that their absence-presence is literally surreal. So once the image has done its job of presenting the ‘sweet-home’, it sets forth to understand the ‘interior’, the well-defined, enclosed and contained frame of the ‘inside’. While her photographs of the beds in the studios of Akademie Schloss Solitude indicate the immediate-ness of an absence, her earlier images capture the time between the performance and the waiting – the performance of ‘home-making’ and the waiting of a ‘user’. However, the images of the crumpled yet silent bed, the folded yet anxious cover-sheet of the bed as well as the vase in the corner, or the lace centre-piece on the dining table, seem calm and composed, as if their purpose was to be in that in-between space, now that they are at peace, not being used, but performing the memories, anxieties, and reminiscences of a constructed life-space.

As the lens starts focusing on the studios in Akademie Schloss Solitude, the same photographic endeavor reveals the working space of artists and academicians, where mostly single individuals use the studio to live and work for short durations of three to twelve months. The in-between home, the working space that also doubles up as the home, is tense about being the ‘elsewhere home’, the space now of an artist anxious about the way he or she deals with life. The frame captures objects once again; however these objects seem to lack the choreographed nature of the earlier pictures. There is a further randomness in the collection of these objects and hence the frame. Titaud’s framing now includes the personal more sharply. The abstract yet composed objects that framed the home earlier are now replaced by single or fewer objects located in a space-context; now the space itself is probably one of the objects alongside others. The assorted objects are obvious in this case, they do not presume a strong narrative, but now they resemble the collage of the one at ‘home’ or at an imagined home.

The narrative is constructed through an ornamented spatiality. The ornamental objects come together to heighten the experience of that which is embellishment and flourish. The ornamental in this case leads in a concrete way towards establishing a fixed notion of home and the world. The ornamental – in the case of the artists’ studios at Solitude – is contained in a sense of ‘collection’. The collected objects try and piece together a narrative, but it is actually their joints that are to be observed, and they are not thus lost in the narrative. Titaud has the capacity to not only sense these aspects but also to frame them, to frame the ‘sense of space’ rather than simply framing objects and their collective settings. What Titaud begins to do in her earlier photographs of the home, reaches an ontological expression even sharper now in the pictures at the Akademie.

As much as her photographs contain objects in a self-complete way, there are also objects that are within the frame only partly. They have entered the frame incompletely or they indicate the continuity of that frame elsewhere; in either case, the final frames of Titaud’s photographs are always running away to, or waiting for, some other ideal and larger frame elsewhere. Again, Titaud is playing out the sense of the object-subject relationship, the objects she has framed, and however universally recognizable they are, they still exist in specific subject-conditions of the very specific space that the picture belongs to. That vase and that wall-paper, or the curio and tablecloth, belong to every home, and yet they are their owner’s very personal objects.

The range of Titaud’s work indicates her concern with two concepts very clearly: the object-hood of things and the sense of a collection. Looking at dry aquariums or cemeteries, the same act is performed with very different valences. Her pictures of the studios at the Akademie form a specific intervention as to how space is perceived and understood, how the space is performed with the sense of collected objects, and defined personally through performed collections. Within the details of these conversations between object-hood and collections, and being proposed in different locations – home, studio, aquarium, cemetery – the aspects of culture’s location in emotion and sentimentality emerge intriguingly. A set of people defined by practice, cultural imagination, nationality or a believed common history invest always in a space of emotion, but always with a more epistemological or aesthetic argument, and Titaud’s photographs are crucial in helping us dissect and investigate these behaviors and habits of people and cultures.