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AUPOL - POLARIS

AUPOL – POLARIS

Galerie Polaris, 15 rue des Arquebusiers, 75003 Paris Tel: + 33 (0) 1 42 72 21 27
November 19, 2022, January 8, 2023
https://www.galeriepolaris.fr

Once again I walk along these corridors, through these rooms, these galleries, in this building from another century …. *

Taking pictures of places of power, one at 121 Boulevard Haussmann and the other at 126 Rue de l’Université in Paris.

Taking pictures of these empty places, bringing to light the different strata that live in them and that are revealed to us like memories in the making.

No dramatization of these momentarily abandoned spaces devoid of their function and their use, just capturing what makes them « places of power ». All we can see is silence and absence, power seems to be lacking. Eric Aupol’s photographs reveal the backstage, the theater of power while it is slumbering.

Eric Aupol has always used photography to show us what cannot be seen with the naked eye. The geometric strictness of the setting shows both the reality and the spaces, like paintings that reveal the successive memories of these places charged with history and representations of power. The velvety photographic texture, the subtle play of reflections and light give an incredible esthetic quality to the whole of this new series.

An impression of distance, in what could only be the topography of the space, is given by the angle of the shots often taken directly facing the camera. The scale is not immediately given to the viewer, perhaps underlining the theatricality of the places and the shootings.

When Eric Aupol wants to describe reception areas, passageways or workspaces, these ordinary places, where everything suggests that people only pass through or occupy them in a very temporary way, he chooses fragments, details, places of silence, of memories, places « after » as well as places « before ».

The past of these visited places, has no reality apart from when it is forcefully recalled by someone, and, by becoming the present, it’s as if it had always been there. The traces captured in these photographs are like the testimonies of past and present events in these places, but they will never be the last …

* First sentence of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s film by Alain Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad

 

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