Alain Guiraudie

A forest, two men, some cows, a house. With what appears to be a stage direction, here we have the ingredients of Alain Guiraudie’s new photographic series exhibited at Galerie Crèvecœur. Adept at “creating objects of desire where one would have never believed possible,” one quickly understands that the relations played out in Guiraudie’s natural amphitheatre will thwart expectations and trouble order. So as to create his own disturbing, desiring mythology. A forest. Autumn. One forest, many possibilities. The forest, in art history, was at first a décor, a bucolic background. An attractive place: secluded, a rediscovered Eden, a refuge for Romantics. It can also be repulsive, sometimes devouring, as fairy tales remind us. It’s the place where we encounter wolves, where supernatural beings and phenomena loom. This centripetal and centrifugal place is at the heart of the image, it inhabits the photographs. It affects our understanding of the scene. No longer an annex of the human world, natural rather than cultural, the forest becomes the only possible place for this encounter, an incubator, unfolding across thirteen images. Two men. One of them is completely naked, the other is wearing a priest’s cassock, through which we can also see his naked body. What might a man do, naked in a forest? What might this man do in this forest, through the gaze of Guiraudie? Everything is realistic: the forest, the men, the cassock, the stone cross, the cows, the house. However, we are in the territory of fiction. The dialectic of the space, such as it plays out here, is tainted with a strange familiarity, seemingly uniting the immensity of the world, its mystery, and the secret need to trouble its order. If, as Bataille once said, the human world – defined by culture and work – is constructed in rupture with the dilapidation of energy intrinsic to natural life, as both sexuality and violence prove, in the photographs of Alain Guiraudie, there is a space that shares the same inspiration as his cinema, telescoping the contours of desire, politics and myth. An anti-world, frontal, deep, magisterial. (1) Taken from Alain Guiraudie’s introduction to the 2024 edition of the Printemps de Toulouse, for which he was the invited artist: “Beyond the simple representation of the world, an important preoccupation of art has been to stage the encounter between the ideal and the real, the mythical and the prosaic, dream and reality, and to even telescope them together. And beyond this, another major preoccupation has been to look for beauty where it shouldn’t be found, creating objects of desire in places that one would have never believed possible. Art, at least art that I find interesting, sets out to question these prevailing codes and conventions, renewing the idea of beauty, or blurring the frontiers between the beautiful and the ugly.