he Los Angeles Center of Photography just opened its doors to the Second Annual Fine Art Exhibition, aka
"Singular point of view 2017". From May 19th to June 23rd,
LACP
will showcase an impressive collection of fine art photography,
accurately selected by Crista Dix, and embracing 50 shoots from the work
of 39 artists, plus 52 additional images, virtually exhibited on an
online gallery.
Among the highlighted artists of this edition, we are proud to
acknowledge the presence of the fine photographer, and founder of
All About Photo, Sandrine Hermand-Grisel, who is joining the show with selected shoots from her last gem,
Sea Sketches
(2016), featuring a ravishing series of intimate pictorial landscapes,
taken during her visual pilgrimages around the beaches of Anna Maria, a
quaint barrier island nestled in the Gulf of Mexico, off of the west
coast of Florida.
Years after her worldwide acclaimed series,
Waterlilies (2006-2011), Sandrine Hermand-Griesel, whose talent has been awarded of the 2005
Prix Kodak de la Critique Photographique,
delights us with a new paradigm of her pictorial language, lying upon a
sophisticated harmony between reality and abstraction, which she is
able to bring to photography thanks to her unique artistic inspiration,
driven by the aesthetics and the meaning of European Modern paintings
and Art.
Sea Sketches is an intimate journey inspired by Casper
David Friedrich & William Turner's painting, reflecting the willing
of the author to recreate an authentic deep artistic experience of
Beauty, meant to deeply involve the self of the observer and his unique
ensemble
of feelings and imagination. To drive the viewer into her inner visual
dialectic, Sandrine Hermand-Grisel retouched these pictures through the
insertion of textures and overlays, in order to manipulate and empathize
their painterly appearance, while keeping the light embodying the
image, as the real subject of the photograph. In this sense, Sandrine
Hermand-Grisel lies beyond exceptional at mastering the laws of the
light imposed by the Camera, as well as those the intervention on the
perception of the observer. The two components fuse together, in a
harmonious and extremely new aesthetic rendering and challenge.
In all the various phases of her work, Sandrine's artistic identity is
spiked by a dual artistic commitment, at the same time deeply classical
and subtly experimental: on one side, as a photographer, she is a
witness of the living present: she referrers to the photographic medium
and its specific potential to capture images and memories, in order to
build an artistic and meaningful visual experience of the making sense
of the World and the Nature surrounding us. On the other side, as an
innovative and conceptual artist, driven by multiple crossed
contaminations, she succeed in creating a new form of photographic
Pictorialism, which turns each picture into a drawing like image and
storytelling, joining together reality and illusion, present and
imagination.
Along with the above mentioned series Waterlilies, as well as the breathtaking collection of portraits known as Nocturnes, Sea Sketches closes a circle of experimentations which lead Hermand Griesel's pictorialism at the top level of style and technique.
Waterlilies remains for us an outstanding masterpiece of
photographic composition and esthetical perfection. The project,
inspired by the celebration of Nature featured by the namesake series of
paintings by the French impressionist artist,
Claude Monet,
featured a touching ensemble of pictures portraying her own children,
bathing in a pool. Here the photographer uses specific stretches of time
along with an detailed treatment of the saturation of the image in
post-production, creating unfocused abstract pictures appearing more
like impressionist art works, than photographs of real and alive
subjects, made of flesh and bones. In each of them, a body of a young
swimmer in movement dramatically emerges in all his graceful harmony
from the depth of the blue and green water of the background, whose
pastel shades and gritty texture remind of Monet's thick and short brush
strokes.
The beauty of these pictures is stunning: despite of the absence of
sharp edges, each body is caught in a unique sculptural pose and
gesture, coming out from the vibrant color temperature of the water, and
it reveals itself as a simple and intimate manifestation of Beauty.
The truth is that behind this abstract and pictorial look, there is a
deep knowledge of the interaction between the camera and its movement in
space, or between the subject and its frame in action. Here again,
Sandrine Hermand- Griesel proves his excellence in a perfect
anticipation of the special context of each posture, as well as its
aesthetic patterns, despite the fast pace of the actors.
All the projects by Hermand Griesel show this profound comprehension of
the specificity of the media objectivity, which is a view on the world
as well as a view of the present moment, but also, in an immanent way,
its diffraction, its abstraction, its formal reflection through targeted
photographic manipulations driven by conceptual, subjective choices.
Rita Peritore Murray
