IN(SIGHT) : Leclaireur Hérold, Paris
The Spaceless Gallery is pleased to introduce the photographic work of the American artist Lara Porzak & French painter Pierre Bonnefille at LECLAIREUR Hérold; old stables, transformed into a magnificent location designed by Armand and Martine Hadida. Béatrice Masi, curator, and founder of the Spaceless Gallery conceived this collaboration to shed new light on the work of Lara, an artist halfway between ancient and modern, who reveals her subjects with a subtle balance between shadow and light. By choosing this place of character, the Spaceless gallery underlines the importance of a dialogue between the work and the place that welcomes it and highlights the synergy that emerges from the association of two parallel worlds.
Lara Porzak's photographic work is carried out using mid 19th century photographic processes. Exploring the equivocality of form, Lara captures scenes from nature with her eye of a romantic photojournalist. More than an automatic gesture, Lara masters the nuance between taking and making the photograph. Like a craftsman, she designs and produces her photographs by transposing the impression into a materialized expression. Among the 28 works selected for this collaborative exhibition, three of them stand out. Imposing and powerful, these photographs bring the viewer back to the place where Lara captured this moment, while the smallest clichés, scattered around this place to intrigue the viewer and intensify his curiosity, intervene like memories. That way they reflect the charm of the place.
Alongside the works of Lara Porzak are three works by French painter Pierre Bonnefille. Using refined powders to produce his pictorial compositions, it is the light that surrounds them that reveals the material and creates an illusion specific to each of the spaces in which they are exhibited. Both artists find their inspiration in nature. Lara uses photography to extract an impression while Pierre expresses the reflections of light on the water in a more abstract way.
For this collaboration, the Spaceless Gallery wanted to establish a multidimensional dialogue between the photographic work of Lara, the pictorial art of Pierre within the intimate atmosphere of LECLAIREUR. It is an experience in which art, fashion and design blend subtly to offer visitors an immersion, a suspended moment in time.
◊ Leclaireur Hérold, 10 rue Hérold, Paris
Lara Porzak is an American photographer living and working in Los Angeles. She exclusively works with analog methods, carefully curated to convey the emotion she wishes to express. Her cameras and developing techniques, requiring great technical mastery, date back to the 19th century (tintypes, gelatin silver lith, wet collodion, etc.).
The artist is particularly attached to the materiality of "handmade" photography and seeks to bring out its original magnetism. She poetically captures universal subjects, such as landscapes, revealing their timeless nature. Likewise, she plays on the ambiguity between abstraction and figuration through her practice of soft focus and deliberately expressive tintypes, evoking distant and ever longing imprints of beauty. As the Los Angeles Times aptly described it, "her photojournalistic style combines with the romantic influences of European photographers from the 1930s and ‘40s to give her work a timeless quality with a strong sense of narrative”. Her photographs have notably joined the J. Paul Getty Museum collections.
*The 29 artworks are presented in the order they appear at Leclaireur.
The Spaceless Gallery website > https://www.thespacelessgallery.com/
