L'Architecture en mouvements

Speaking architecture: the expression, often applied to Ledoux and frequently reused about Las Vegas architecture, may be true of any construction. Each building embodies an idea (or an absence thereof) or serves an ideology, if one cares to listen. In photography, the Bechers showed how their art could bring out sculptural objects in industrial landscapes. While modern cinema (Resnais, Godard, Antonioni, Rohmer…) paid incomparable attention to the architecture of its time, works designed for gallery exhibition seem more interested in the architecture of the past (Dean or Huyghe, for instance), whether semi-forgotten utopian constructions or emblematic buildings of modernity.

For the past few years, Louidgi Beltrame has set out to explore large-scale buildings or architectural series, the embodiments or memories – more or less alive – of a few grand ideas of the second half of the twentieth century. After a semi-fictional travelogue between Brasilia and Chandigarh and an exploration of Gunkanjima, an island and ghost town off Nagasaki, he visits Pripyat, a now deserted Atomgrad and a sealed-off area close to Chernobyl.
While he does not systematically do away with dialogue or commentary, Beltrame takes the concrete monuments apart primarily through the movement of images and the combination of shots. He does not only do so to analytical ends, but also in order to produce a form of cinematographic plasticity and even monumentality. With Alexandre Costanzo, we will try and add movement to movement, with fluidity if possible.

Solo show of the artist, « ENERGODAR », presented at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard from November 19 to December 23, 2010.