The fourth solo exhibition of Louis Heilbronn (lives and works in Los Angeles) at Galerie Polaris, Prologue to a Myth, is a series of 24 photographs, mixing the mediums of photography and drawing, made between September 2019 and July 2021.

Prologue to a Myth should be seen as a story, composed of several parts. This new series seeks to discuss the visual language of storytelling, and the embedded presence of narrative in photography. Each photograph can be seen as the representation of a symbol (imaginary or real) that evokes to the viewer, a sense of beginning, the start of a story, tale or myth. Louis Heilbronn ask us to search within our own memories for iconography that outlines this story.

Louis Heilbronn’s raw material has been, and remains, that of the intimate, which he accentuates in this new series by introducing a set of photographed drawings.
The ambiguity between drawing and photographed drawing, between imagined reality and photographed reality, is built around a series that seems to be born of a dream world.

The artist acts as a director, we are indeed on a theater stage, that of life, but seen as in a dream. By ignoring space, time and action, Louis Heilbronn brings to this series a magical observation of the invisible.

It is always with the same modesty and restraint that mark his three previous bodies of work: Meet me on the Surface (2013) From Flowers and More (2014) Orchard Continued (2019) that Louis Heilbronn continues to build a just and intelligent work in an atmosphere as beautiful as it is strange.

Everything here seems to be bathed in the “blue hour”, the moment before nightfall when the sky fills with a dark blue and transports us to another world.

Louis Heilbronn will present his third solo exhibition at the Polaris Gallery in Paris from March 9 to April 6, 2019.
Orchard Continued can be seen as an album of images collected over the course of solitary journey into the Californian landscape. Resembling a cultural inventory of the famed American west, it does not provide us with the means to identify specific locations, but instead immerses us, through an elliptical and critical narrative, in an anachronistic and undefined space and time.
A singular beauty emerges from in this series, most often coming from the strange contrast between the simplicity of the each landscape, subject or object photographed and the subtle light that emerges from their environment.As an observer of his own social space, Louis Heilbronn captures the “crossings” of this environment, from which he most often shows us extracts, pieces of life, focusing in detail on insignificant occurrences. Here, the pictorial, literary and cinematographic references that have shaped the imagination of the great American West are collected and combined with great deal of control.
With the intent of creating an idealized image, Louis Heilbronn photographs like a novelist, and with this series evokes thoughts that can be read among the ones of the American transcendentalists of the late 19th century. In this regard the spectator is offered the natural beauty of the world enveloped in the inherent quietness of each moment and landscape.
Leading us to feel as if we are seeing and feeling the world for the first time. The strength of Louis Heilbronn’s eye is to make us question what he shows us: these are not just vernacular landscapes but social and political landscapes, which question both our relationship to photography as a representation of the world but also the stability of nation and its uncertain future.
It is this gift and this interest in observation that makes it possible to say that photography is Louis Heilbronn’s natural language. With Orchard Continued the artist shares with us the need to continue to observe the world through this language. If it is the artist who decides which scenes we are to interpret, it is then the repertoire of images held by each viewer that will guide them in exploring the work, granting them access to the simplicity of its gaze.