Les unes et les autres
Jean Rault
The retrospectives of Jean Rault’s portraits organised by 19, Centre régional d’art contemporain de Montbéliard and by the Musée de Louviers highlight the coherence of the work of this major photographer who, while making forays into other fields such as landscape, made the portrait the focus of his work. His work took off under the auspices of two portrait masters, August Sander and Diane Arbus. His work lies at the crossroads of what can function as a clue and a symptom in the image of the body. Jean Rault’s portraits reveal an extreme attention to the other: to this other and this other embodied and captured in what they crystallise of life, charge and desire. But also the wounds, the stigmata and the violence of their own existence and the gaze that stares back at them. The fact that it is being shown at the Musée de Louviers in particular is symbolic. It was there, at the start of his career, that he found the curator at the time, Anne-Marie Rothiot, particularly attentive to his work. Coming to the Musée de Louviers, on the enlightened advice of the pioneering Pierre Gaudibert, founding curator of the ARC in Paris, to present his early work and receive his initial advice, was a moment of great importance for him, marking his career as a kind of memorial marker. Returning to this museum today is, in a way, a measure of how far he has come. This monograph devoted to Jean Rault’s portraits brings out with impressive force his art of laying bare the body and human beings, revealing their multiple radiance, but also the shadows and ambivalence that shape them. And it does so with an acuity and awareness that draws its light from a subtle dialogue between the body and what painting has been able to deliver in its densest form. Featuring a large number of reproductions, this work benefits from the expert contributions of three authors. In a dense text, historian and critic Pierre Wat sheds essential light on the characteristics of this major work. The philosopher Marcel Hénaff circumscribes the aim of his art of stripping the body to reveal humanity in all its states. Finally, the critic Catherine Pomparat, combining text and image, in a nod to Roland Barthes, brings to light the intersection of East and West in the artist’s photographs since his deliberate inclusion in the Japanese cultural space. Philippe Cyroulnik, director of 19, Centre régional d’art contemporain de Montbéliard Michel Natier, director of the Musée de Louviers
112 pages pages 22 x 22 cm Le musée de Louviers et le 19 2011 978-2-35075-067-5 25 €
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