Weddings

This "marriage" series is doubly original and singular in Etienne Renzo's career, with photographs that are both abstract and semi-accidental. The antithesis of posed, laboratory-worked images. Here, the photography results from a process linked to the decay of silver Ektachrome slides of wedding ceremonies taken in the 70s and 80s. Strange images, at once resurrected and produced by the chance of an astonishing alchemy of shapes and colors.

Images forgotten and never shown
Forgotten in their original boxes for many years, the slides underwent a dual process of slow decomposition and dendritic crystallization of their dyes. The resulting images are the result of the chaotic fusion of chromogenic layers. They also fix the temporality of the process, which may have spanned several years. These never-before-seen images will be presented in light boxes that reveal all their substances and chromatic subtleties. Like phantasmagorical stained-glass windows that owe as much to chance as to the chemistry of matter, color and light. Images that bring into play the phenomena of pareidolia (illusion referring back to familiar images), reminiscent of shots of the cosmic depths, aerial views of the earth, or photographs of cells taken with an electron microscope.

Images with an alchemical dimension
From an aesthetic and historical point of view, these images, partly created by chance, take us back to the informal abstract painting of the 1950s and 1960s, linked to the multiple anti-painting and anti-art movements, as much as to immemorial creative processes. These include alchemical traditions, whose philosophy was to regenerate nature through culture. And vice versa. In this way, they create an anti-photography, overturning the codes and customs of the image. Let's not forget that the metaphysics of marriage lies at the heart of the alchemical process, through the hierogamy of the moon and the sun. Or the fusion of opposites, which allows the "artist", who is none other than the alchemist, to access the androgynous principle known as the "rebis", the final step before accessing the "great work" to elaborate the philosopher's stone. A stone synonymous with a panacea that cures all ills and gives access to a form of immortality.

A ghost photograph
In deciding to exhume and resurrect these images for exhibition, Etienne Renzo invents (in the sense of discovering a buried archaeological treasure) a form, a paradoxical photography that is at once totally conceptual and material. And, in a way, natural. A raw, organic, transhistorical and alchemical form of photography that marries the principles of the human and the non-human. Doesn't the artist himself speak of "transmutation"? This is the height of photographic chemistry, when these images invent their own laboratory by touching on the invisible. For these images clearly have something to do with ghosts and cultures of the invisible. Particularly when they reveal the silhouettes of presences that might suggest entities. They also have something in common with automatic writing, the Rorschach test or reading coffee grounds, connecting the depths of the unconscious with those of nature. It's as if they sublimate and fix, in a paradoxical zoom effect, the unknown space we presume to exist between the multiple dimensions of reality. From micro to macro, between the visible and the invisible.

Hypnotic images that heal
However, left to their own contemplation, these images have a reassuring energy. In other words, they can evoke sensations of calm, serenity and even voluptuousness. Not far from the hypnotic effect of contemplating goldfish in an aquarium or a kaleidoscope of light colors. Not far from the magic of stained glass or paintings. That's why these images are both useful and precious. They are true works of art, transcending the status of both the object and the subject of the photograph. Unless they fully embody it in an aesthetic of sublimation, overcoming and resilience. For these images repair. Firstly, they repair the fracture between the feminine and the masculine. And, more generally, between the natural and the cultural. Which is part of our contemporary dramaturgy. Which is probably why they are destined to become active symbols, even icons, of the era that resurrected them. Like sleeping beauties awakened to reactivate a form of photographic panacea.

The exhibition project
The exhibition project consists first of all in continuing the work of exhuming the slides from their boxes. Next, the slides will be selected and printed for lightboxes. The exhibition will feature between 20 and 30 prints. A new series of slide re-decompositions has recently been initiated, based on the archives of Etienne Renzo.