The clear room Gallery of Douarnenez presents until January 4, 2025 an exhibition of Fanny Penin titled The Assizes. It is accompanied by this text by Eric Premel.
Sometimes it only takes a chance encounter, one day, tattooed in the memory, for years later to arise emergencies that we did not suspect and for a long and patient journey to take place which will explore this past encounter. A trivial incident that will make sense, without us knowing it. Many people have experienced this operation, in art as in all things.
It is the resurgence of such an event that photographer Fanny Penin recounts here, which led her to the pictorial, sensitive, humanist and disturbing adventure of these Neapolitan Assizes.
And trying to find out the underlying reason(s) that triggered this work in her is ultimately not of vital interest. Astonishment? Identification? Repair ? Worry ? Fascination? Vertigo,… What does it matter!
What matters is what it produces, which everyone will grasp wherever they are, at the moment when their gaze meets the fruit of Fanny Penin's visions.
It is also important to include the images produced in a photographic school, relatives and affiliations or in an artistic movement, whether naturalist or realistic: what seemed essential to us was rather located in the relationship proposed by the subjects /objects/contexts photographed, their intrinsic power, the heart of the work at hand, the language they conveyed, in short their poetic and political power, real and phantasmagorical.
To specify that only Naples was capable of generating this Assizes is superfluous: no other city in the world has allowed, in this way, such a disjointed theater.
Carol Gilligan), testifying as much as giving the floor, Wandering on the stages of this theater, Fanny Penin worked to give an account of these Assises, with care (in the sense of Care developed by gathering as much as inventorying, without ever sacrificing the backgrounds (walls, floors, cracks, shadows, more scenes than settings…) and off-camera so that the image, endowed with life, expresses its dramaturgy.
Demanding, worried, meticulous, patient, careful, extremely precise and down to the smallest details in all stages of her work (from the shooting to the prints which she masters to perfection), Fanny Penin creates a universe with precious detail which reaffirms the inflexible humanity of things.
(…)
This is how Fanny Penin's chairs, not knowing whether to resolve to live or to die, settled in waiting, leaving us alone with populated images.
It follows that, now that they have become ours, by the sheer force of our gaze, we hesitate, who are they, what have they been doing, since when and why,…
Silent widows who are still fighting?
The metamorphoses of our reflections?
Sacrificial ex-votos?
A doomed people? Supplied?
Our own caricatures?
Leftovers from childhood?
The funeral witnesses to the Camorra murders, a Neapolitan mirror of the images of Letizia Battaglia, the incandescent photographer, on the Sicilian Cosa nostra?
Vestiges and dizziness in the abyss?
A symphony of disorder from another side of memory?
The metaphors of a small people of unreason?
What shadows are they and do they make when the city sleeps?
Their positions, often fatal, ignoring the laws of balance, slip into the ear of the passerby voices that were, hospitable gestures that were given, the charm of ancient riots, births and deaths to no end. no longer finish.
The Assizes of Fanny, shadows of themselves, are angels in a landscape after the battle, that of our little stories, rumors incarnate.
And their silence says a lot about the multi-millennial city, about what solitude is profoundly like in a courtyard of miracles where only chairs still watch over the deceased as well as over the hopes.
They watch, tortured, over the melancholy melody of Na sera 'e maggio that Roberto Murolo sings on the guitar.
What is a photograph?
Something like these unique foundations, an image that does not give up.
An image that fades to reveal only what it intended to show.
Bigger than the photograph claimed to be: a story.
Excerpts from the text by Éric Premel (director) for “Les Assises” by Fanny Penin.
Fanny Penin: The Assizes
Until January 4, 2025
The clear room Gallery
3 rue Voltaire
29100 Douarnenez
www.lachambreclairegalerie.fr
Fanny Penin
https://fannypenin.wixsite.com/fanny-penin
https://www.instagram.com/fannypenin/
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