GOWEN is honoured to host a solo exhibition by French artist-photographer Aurélie Pétrel (b.1980, Lyon).

Ecarts. Vues et Données presents around 30 works across various formats, produced by Pétrel over the past ten years and complements the artist’s concurrent exhibition, View and Data at Photo Elysée, Lausanne.

Not only an experimental photographer, Pétrel has, throughout a comprehensive career, striven to place a philosophical and conceptual emphasis in her work. Like a personal manifesto, her avant-garde, theoretical methods and unique terminology may today be considered as a point of reference for a younger generation of photographers, in particular, in the area of post-photography.

Of significant interest are several emblematic inclusions from the artists oeuvre, in particular selected works from her PROCESS series, as well as from Sillons and Tracés, which exemplify the distinctive techniques relating to photographic or sculptural possibilities invented by Pétrel and which mark key advances in the evolution of photography within the art historical canon. A film diptych shot in the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto complements other pieces included at Photo Elysée and which are reflected in the gallery show.

The work of Aurélie Pétrel questions the image, its status, its (re)presentation and its production mechanisms. From photographic shots, she develops her language in an approach which goes beyond photography to explore the field of plastic art, transferring the flatness of shots to the creation of volume pieces or architecture. Through processes of consecutive mise en abymes, Pétrel addresses the question of the persistence and transformation of the image.

At the core of Pétrel’s work are the notions of fragmentation and synthesis, where works are configured in several versions or “activations”. Through experimental methods, Pétrel works in formats that require great skill. Her installations, often consisting of large glass panels, or of images printed onto wood, metal, felt, or tissue paper are planned systematically and with precision. Sourced from a personal laboratory of images taken across several cities, notably Lyon, Romme

(France), Paris, Beirut, and Tokyo, Pétrel’s shots are archived in a ‘meuble jachère’, an ambiguous, raw steel cabinet containing ten black box-folders and a kind of holding ground specifically constructed by the artist, inside which latent images, collected over 20 years of shooting, remain until the moment when Pétrel acknowledges their readiness to re-emerge.

As these “activated” images, often selected from different origins, take form and shape, they find sequence and their next place in the world.

According to the artist “some images resist, and these are the ones which I gather, using them in such a way that they take shape and volume, to become rooted back into the world. Through the

process of gaining body, a new work is born, destined to land somewhere else”.