Best known for his ‘Transparencies’ series of outsize, glowing photographs, Canadian artist Jeff Wall has always focused on the creation of ambitious, grand-scale documentary works. Here, however, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson has got its hands on 35 smaller pieces from the artist’s personal collection. Among them, 14 smallish glowing boxes containing stunning, sordidly detailed still-life photos, like ‘Diagonal Composition’, which nostalgically depicts a battered old sink in his attic. The exhibit also highlights various impressionistic monochrome and colour prints (many of which were unplanned, unposed and captured on a mobile phone). ‘Searchers 2007’, for instance, recalls Georges Seurat’s blurred field workers and the contemporary paintings of Tim Eitel.
In all of these works, rather than focusing on full-fledged characters and objects, Walls zooms in on the fragmented yet evocative details (an arm, a leg, a bare torso, a corner, a ray of light). The effect is at once bewildering and haunting: for the viewer, it’s like attempting to patch together the damaged memory of an amnesiac.
TRANSLATION: HUW OLIVER