Profane #18 - Spring Summer 2024 - Amateur and Art

Profane #18 - Spring Summer 2024 - Amateur and Art

Enjoying a drink outdoors on a balmy day, in what used to be a Paris university campus. It’s our first time here and we’re waiting for the discussion on “Taking a Look at Our Surroundings” to begin. So we observe the building’s transformation and wonder about third places. The former Sorbonne Nouvelle, built in the 1970s, reminds us of Bernard, who was a lecturer at the nearby Tolbiac university, while creating carpets at home in a high-rise in the Olympiades neighborhood. 1970s architecture. Some love it while others prefer to leave the city and build a house in lime and hemp with their hands and their patience, in harmony with nature City life or country life. Suburban life too: Bagneux is clearly a good place to live, a town on the outskirts of Paris whose residents takes part every year in an artistic event. If I had to choose, I’d head for the seaside, to Brittany for example, towards Paimpol, where Denis can be spotted scouring the beaches for crab claws and carcasses to make on-the-spot sculptures. The shore, the call of the sea, the figure of the sailor: Hubert knows it well, as he enjoyed tracking down canvases featuring exclusively fishermen with pipes. A collector at heart, he has many other humble treasures, including some 300 movie posters featuring the Statue of Liberty. Three hundred… numbers always make me dizzy. Numbers such as this one: 250,000. It’s the number of pictures of cemeteries from all over the world that André has taken. It’s also the number of amateur photos Christophe has collected from family albums and boxes found in Berlin flea markets and antique stores. They sit among a multitude of other collections that occupy his studio. Amateur photography is also a treasure trove for Jonathan, who compulsively seeks out images in which the subject has disappeared, the matrix of his artistic practice. Albums, an abyss of intimacy, even faceless... Matthieu has brought back from Tokyo a thick notebook containing matchboxes that reveal a lot about the wanderings of a certain Matsuko. Who was this daughter of fire? From flames to embers, we start to dream of barbecues, a fine-weather tradition. We’ll have to get in touch with Antoine, who certainly knows how to light them as well as draw them.
The talk is about to begin.

Carine Soyer