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'Silver fish', LE JARDIN DE NORIKO 2019 © Isa Marcelli |
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Le jardin de Noriko |
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4 April – 12 June, 2020 |
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| | |  | | | | 'Garden in spring', LE JARDIN DE NORIKO 2018 © Isa Marcelli | | |
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Beginning and end are in the garden. From here - from the shade of picturesque trees or from the silence of the tiny pond - from here our life once went out; and here it will return. At least that is what the old tales want; legend of Avalon or of Eden, of the green of the Hespherides or the far-off paradise: "There the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east," it says right at the beginning of Genesis. And in the 47 Sura of the Koran it is adorned: "Brooks with water that is not rotten", there shall be. "Others with milk that tastes unchanged, others with wine that is a pleasure to drink, and still others with purified honey. |
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| | |  | | | | 'The tea house 2', LE JARDIN DE NORIKO 2017 © Isa Marcelli | | |
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So in this garden everything is there: ...abundance and beauty in excess, peace, charm, harmony. What often seems wild and uncontrolled outside, is here cast in cosmic order. And even if this garden is perhaps disguised and lost, it remains promise and human longing: Beyond cherubs and rotten fences, the enchanted world will one day open up. As once in the old monastery gardens, it will point us to a well-formed order - to the divine in a self-contained reality.
It is precisely this almost archetypal longing that the photographer Isa Marcelli, born in Algeria in 1958 and now living in France, shows in her current exhibition "Le jardin de Noriko". Marcelli's Eden, however, is not embedded between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, nor is it in seventh heaven, out of touch with the world. The "Garden of Noriko" is an earthly spot, located in Bourron-Marlotte, the photographer's current home, at the entrance to the forest of Fontainebleau. Once the legendary school of Barbizon started from here, the art of the en plein air, the quivering of light of the Impressionists. |
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| | |  | | | | 'Tea bowl', 2018 © Isa Marcelli | | |
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You can see it in Isa Marcelli's 40 or so photographs: Right down to the finest grain size, the desire for nature and origin, which arose in the 19th century, has served as a model here. On the surface, "Le jardin de Noriko" is a classic Japanese garden - a man by the name of André Quenot is said to have laid it out some 30 years ago - but the way Marcelli stages this garden photographically, how she lures light out of its hiding places and arranges things into secrets, all this is based on the poetic vision of Fontainebleau; on great pioneers such as Charles Nègre, Constant Famin or Gustave Le Gray.
And formally, too, the photographs taken between 2017 and 2019 can be read as a homage to an era long gone. Whether cyanotype, collodion or lithprint: the 62-year-old photo artist has repeatedly experimented with materials and processes that are at odds with the digital present. With an elegiac, at times melancholic gaze, Isa Marcelli has succeeded in creating a group of works with "Le jardin de Noriko" with which the viewer can travel far back in time - back to that mysterious garden that stands at the beginning of all our longing.
Ralf Hanselle |
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| | |  | | | | 'Allium', LE JARDIN DE NORIKO 2019 © Isa Marcelli | | |
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© 28 Apr 2020 photo-index UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
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Editor: Claudia Stein & Michael Steinke
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