“The still hour”: a Mediterranean metaphysics by Bernard Plossu

30/06/2016. La Fábrica [MAD] Spain, 02.06 >31.07.2016
metalocus, ELENA GALLEGO DE VELASCO

"The still hour. Mediterranean Metaphysics" is a project by the artist Bernard Plossu, which features 106 images taken over 30 years in different locations, such as southern France, Spain, Greece, Italy and Turkey, and now they all are published together in his new book.

Bernard Plossu, "The still hour". Photograph © Bernard Plossu

La Fábrica starts a new project with the publication of the book The still hour, the last one by the French photographer Bernard Plossu. In here he reflects on the real dimension of the landscapes and the architectural frames through marked character snapshots, where white light is always present and it overshadows the individuals, as if they were places with no time. Plossu manages to take the viewer into a dreamlike journey between time and light. Also, this publication coincides with the Plossu's work exhibition in Madrid from June 2nd to July 31st, within the event of PHotoEspaña 2016.

La Fábrica publishes The still hour, a dialogue between the French photographer Bernard Plossu and the Mediterranean metaphysics which have been helding by the author for thirty years. A project that sees the light in both book and exhibition format with a sample held in the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid.

Over a hundred black and white images taken in Spain, France, Italy and Greece run the pages of this volume. These cities in addition to Mexico and the southern United States make up the places where the photographer has devoted special attention throughout his life.

Plossu photographs what he observed in a constant search of the perfect tonal scale. His work aims to capture those moments "of waiting, those which are between two actions, two places, two times; those moments of transition that sometimes become landscapes between two worlds, two consciousnesses" Ricardo Vazquez writes in the book's foreword.

The still hour includes desertic and silent landscapes, which can be real or imagined and which are as mysterious as familiar. "Buildings, shops, roads, hallways, roadways, factories, seashores or kerbstones become doors that allow us to pass to the other side of the mirror" in these Plossu's photographs, according to Vazquez.

Meanwhile, Juan Manuel Bonet tells in its text that Plossu searches in this work "to fly mentally to Marseille and other cities in the French Midi, to Italy, to Greece, to Andalusia and other regions of Spain. Mediterranean solar lands with a Ruben Darío style, yes, lime and sun lands, land of cactus and grasshoppers, the sole a picco land, with linear illustrations by Morandi, as Vincenzo Cardarelli sang in 1929. The South: ideal homeland, metaphysical, abstract, from this camera's poet".