In photos and drawings, an “aimless stroll” through Rome presented at Espace 14 in Nîmes

How can we look at a city whose images have permeated the imagination for centuries? Photographer Bernard Plossu doesn’t like postcards. With the exhibition “Roma”, presented at space 14, he brings together two painter friends, Marcelo Fuentes and François Avril, for another perspective.

“One day I decided to start photographing Rome and I went back ten or fifteen times”said the photographer simply. “I walk on an adventure, at random. It’s a walk without a goal”continues Bernard Plossu, who always works with fixed optics, a 50 mm lens, closest to the human eye. The photographer sees a connection with the sobriety of the painter Camille Corot’s gaze. “This allows you to photograph ruins, a street, a portrait in the metro or a laughing child without effect”explains Bernard Plossu, who unlike Henri Cartier-Bresson seeks the “non-decisive moments” and not to “seize the time but evoke it.”

The search for the timeless

This involves slowness, wandering, a taste for separation. No monumentality in this journey, but a distance from things, an attention to detail. This also involves prints playing with the miniature, forcing the viewer to really stop, to immerse themselves in this sober and silent black and white. “The photo and the author must be timeless. If I become fashionable, I’m dead”laughs Bernard Plossu, for whom these images “are not made to please but to be.”

The painter Marcelo Fuentes also spent a lot of time in Rome, staying at the Villa Medici at the end of the 1980s. Based on photos taken at the time, he delivers a series of drawings, views of architecture, worlds depopulated. No character in this Roman grayness. “What interests me is silence, tranquility, not movement”explains the painter who concentrates the image, brings together fragments of the world, plays with the purity of lines, looks at modernity with interest and distance to create vaporous and timeless atmospheres.

Color appears in Bernard Avril’s drawings, but often limited to a single dominant. Accustomed to large canvases, he returned to Rome for the exhibition, returning with a series of small works on paper. He works from memory, with a style which consists of “eliminate.” Humans are just silhouettes, brought back “at their right size in relation to the universe.” Bernard Avril prefers to watch “the great freedom” trees in the city, the morning blues and the twilight reds and share a form of harmony that is only found in the chance encounter.