On the occasion of Fo-To 2018 Gagliardi and Domke presents the personal exhibition of the French artist Aurore Valade.

Aurore Valade designs participatory photographic devices where she invites anonymous people to (re)play moments inspired by their daily lives. His images are based on testimonies and stories that try to draw a territory that is both intimate and social. It’s about telling complex identities in which characters reveal themselves and merge through their environment. The interiors photographed are as many small private museums where objects are accumulated that testify to the mixing and mixing of Mexican popular culture.
Between inventory and fiction, Aurore Valade’s photographic compositions concentrate fragments of life, and time, that of living, becomes the main subject.
“My photographs are not decisive moments but a constellation of ordinary moments that overlap like fragments of a totality lost and infinitely recomposed. I have no hesitation in mixing multiple views of the same scene in a single photograph to fuse details and fragments into a form that only makes sense through the accumulation that gives rise to it. The narrative is not linear, it becomes compact as if an attempt was made to unite a multiplicity of stories. The depth of field extends infinitely and from the foreground to the background it displays a clarity that would be impossible without the help of the computer that creates the “collages”. The image is a surface without depth. Nothing is real in this openly theatrical space other than the sincerity with which the portrait is offered to our gaze. In my work I compact space and time.
Each image is the story of a life that is exposed at the moment it seems to explode in excess and saturation. I work with this excess to give my images a reading that takes more and more time. . It is a laborious read because it is important to decipher the image and make our eyes work to capture the countless details. The viewer is therefore invited to change position: from contemplating the image he becomes an investigator, trying to put together a puzzle that could still be missing. The image presents itself as a mass of signs that mobilize the clues to an enigma.
The enigma could be that of these objects that surround us and make up our biography. The enigma would also be that of the dust that settles there, even if all these things will survive us. Or the enigma of this face that looks at us impassively as if it had made a pact with the space that surrounds it to the point of merging into it and misunderstanding itself. What if we were no longer faced with portraits, but still lifes, these silent lives that are irremediably out of time?
However, a temporal marker reminds us of the present: the diary of the day inserted in each photograph of the “Mexican Interiors” series indicates a very concrete date and reveals to us the chaos of the outside world which seems much more agitated than these saturated interiors that I photograph. This present time of the image is already a time for us, contemporary spectators: it is no longer the French President Hollande who shakes hands with his Mexican counterpart. Yet this gesture is emblematic, and if it is contextual, it could also have passed through other times. It is therefore not a question of putting the portrait out of time, but of putting it to work in good time. These photographs are imperfect, fragmentary and future-hungry biographies that attempt to inhabit the vestiges and vertigo of a troubled world.”

The images from the “Mexican interiors” series will be set up in close dialogue with images from the “Sempervivum decorum” series.
In an abandoned botanical garden, the scientific names of plants have been replaced by tourists’ names, carved into cactus leaves.
“We might even be surprised in the presence of a cactus when looking at this Perec style inventory. Covered in graffiti like an old wall in Pompeii, captured with a flash in the nightlight of a cemetery, these images are no less portraits than any others. They are not simple images of aloes or agaves, but represent ghosts of the present. At night, graffiti or tags cover every single corner with petitions to mothers, overabundant words and embellished signatures. Isolated from photographic light, these crude bearded plants become more human than the most sensitive human of all. With their prickly artichoke-like leaves covered in human petitions, these vegetable dazibaos claim more than just artistic status and, for a moment, transform into indistinct portraits of our urban practices.”
François Bazzoli, Des éclats d’Aurore, text from the exhibition
“Le temps de l’été” Museum of Modern Art in Collioure, 2008.

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