Philippe Durand Yannick Miloux
On the occasion of the first installment of this new cycle of Conversations on art around the theme In Situ & In Vivo, artist Philippe Durand will discuss the poetic theorem on which his visual investigation of spaces is based. With Yannick Miloux, head of Frac Limousin, and art critic Pascal Beausse.
Philippe Durand examines contemporary social and economic realities through the articulation of image and object. He operates within a system of « floating vision, » looking for weak signals, fragile signs, and anonymous acts of writing that still speak to the effects of living conditions forced by hypermodernity on individuals and the environment.
With the OFFSHORE project, currently exhibited at the Laurent Godin gallery and at the Centre photographique d’Île-de-France, after an initial show at the Centre de la photographie de Genève, Durand puts forth a possible representation of the concrete social and territorial consequences of the invisibility of financial flows through tax havens.
BIOGRAPHIES
Philippe Durand
Since the mid-1990s, Philippe Durand has been developing an original method that owes as much to Walter Benjamin’s stroller, with his Baudelairean intropathy, as to the urban wanderings of the Situationists and Raymond Hains’s play on words. His attitude parallels the hybridized approaches of an ethnographer observing the contemporary industrial world, a traveler exploring the space of hypermodernity, a tourist whose lens would not serve to reproduce the imagery of postcards but to look on the side, where the setting shows some cracks. In each of his forays into reality, Philippe Durand resists turning into a fiction a world already derealized by rampant artificialization and uniformization.
Durand comes from a generation of artists which succeeded the Appropriationists or the post-photographers of the 1980s. He has turned the means of expression that is photography into a tool for a critical and poetic exploration of the present world. His political and ecological consciousness has not made him oblivious to the fact that art consists in giving shape to ideas. His formal resolutions are meant to convey a thought on the world – a thought that may described as « caressing, » to quote Michel Maffesoli, a restless thought that takes into account the polysemic nature of social and natural realities.
