Oil, en français Ici
Oil, in English: here
Oil, in italiano: qui
1 - Presentation
2 - Text (French): Oil, une expérience artistique
3- Gallery: photographies Oil
4 - Exhibitions
5 - Residency: Oil, portraits de jardins
8 - Text: Diane Bodart, Columbia University
Oil is a fossil fuel. Indeed, the geological layers and the the production of the living biomaterial take millions of years (up to 800 million according to some analyzes) to produce the oil that we use to go shopping or on holiday...
I am fascinated by time scales. When I juxtapose the fragile seeds of a dandelion with a motor oil basin, I investigate the relation between ephemeral and permanence. I try to print on paper the effect of a special moment — the encounter between fragility and immutability. Maybe this intersection defines what we call a “landscape”?
When I am watching the strange beauty of the modern landscapes, I keep in mind global warming and ecology, but not only this: Art is like life. It is not possible to contain it in a political discourse. I finally have to admit that I love the smell and the very dark aspect of the motor oil (maybe because of a childhood memory). I also admire the shape of the nuclear chimney, no matter if it is the worst invention of our civilization. Maybe my works try to create what Baudelaire wanted to do with his poetry: “You gave me your mud and I have turned it into gold.”
OIL MIRRORS
The work of Dominique Robin is particularly fascinating in that it manages to condense by a new medium—oil photography—several optical effects that are specific to different traditional mirroring instruments: first, the delimited and life-size reflection one would see in a at mirror, on the surface of his basin of oil; second, the focusing that comes from reducing the luminous intensity (an effect one can get from a “black mirror” or “Claude glass,” a darkened convex mirror used by Claude Lorrain and other painters), in the blackness of his drain oil; and, finally, the optical reduction one would see in a convex mirror, in the fortuitous bubbles created by the density of his oil. Through these fragile little spheres, these barely perceptible bubbles, the artist and his landscape are secretly inscribed en abyme (that is, a process of repetition and reduction of an image within an image) at the heart of the work, surprising the attentive viewer by revealing the scenario of the work’s production.
Diane Bodart is the David Rosand Assistant Professor of art history, Columbia University.
*A Claude glass (or black mirror) is a small mirror, slightly convex in shape, with its surface tinted a dark colour. Bound up like a pocket-book or in a carrying case, Claude glasses were used by artists, travelers and connoisseurs of landscape and landscape painting. Claude glasses have the effect of abstracting the subject reflected in it from its surroundings, reducing and simplifying the colour and tonal range of scenes and scenery to give them a painterly quality. The Claude glass is named for Claude Lorrain, a 17th-century landscape painter (Source)
Oil first exhibition: Galerie Lazarew (Paris, rue du perche) in July 2015 and in Biennale de Melle from Juy to September. See also at the Biennale de Melle: Tristan’s Ascension & Fire Woman, de Bill Viola , Yuriko Takag, Laurent Millet, Florian de la Salle...
Thanks to Sarah Kanele !
See also about petroleum and carbon: