The work of Céline Duval, who signs under the artist name documentation céline duval, is often based on amateur photographs. His gaze collects, rejects or keeps, classifies and prioritizes, relates and then develops a scenario in images. The book is among his privileged forms of expression.
In 2011, invited by Didier Schulmann, curator at the Kandinsky Library – National Museum of Modern Art Center Pompidou, she discovered the family photographs of Wassily Kandinsky, bequeathed in 1981 by the painter's widow, Nina. Kandinsky played an important role in the formation of Céline Duval's gaze: very quickly, the latter imagined from these photographic archives a very personal version of Point et ligne sur plan, the theoretical work of the painter that she prefers.
In January 2013, the publication “heart, point and line on plan” was published. Between Kandinsky's pictorial universe and the intimate photographs she selected for this book, Céline Duval organizes a flow of formal analogies, from painting to photography, from social life to inner vision. The balance of an abstract composition can be read in the light of a loving gaze, in the swing of a dress in the wind, the verticality of a maritime pine or the wavering of a trajectory in the dune.
Usually, the people who populate Céline Duval’s photos are anonymous. In this specific case, the fact that his subject is a celebrity does not really change his approach, even though the pleasure of entering into the intimacy of such a myth is not to be denied.
If Céline Duval implicitly offers us a mirror of the society in which Kandinsky evolves, the sociological approach cannot suffice here: on the horizon of the artist's images, we can discern less History or the evocation of an era (the Bauhaus, Albers, Moholy Nagy, Nina's love, etc.) than the body and its writing in space. Céline Duval also erases the marks of aging that time brings to the surface of the photographic document through meticulous restoration work, to better look at the images of these beings and the landscapes in which they evolve in the present.
Printed on puffy paper, mounted on a spiral, the book looks like a drawing book. As for the title, “heart, point and line on plan”, it soberly sets out a new balance, to be sought between emotional transport, elementary forces and geometric rigor.
Design : Myriam Barchechat
84 pages, black spiral binding.
Size: 21 x 15,5 cm
Printed in offset
1000 copies
Semiose éditions
2013
