Valérie Jouve – Résonances

Valérie Jouve (born in 1964) belongs to a new generation of young artists in France who have bid farewell to their country’s great tradition of humanistic, reportorial photography while retaining its still useable essential elements; i.e., she photographs landscapes, and above all cityscapes and ultra-dense urban situations, in a documentary manner.

At the same time – and this often means in the same picture – she takes photographs of people in the middle of a movement, an act, a backward glance, a laugh, an appearance. Landscapes and portraits, two classical themes in painting and photography, here brought together in one picture in such a way that they constitute a choreographic scenario in and before the backdrop of documented urban space.

The collision between the staged and portrayed elements, between the metropolitan urban framework and the expressions, gestures and actions of the individual opens up a fictitious space that tastes of reality; its theme is the relationship, allusion and resonance between space and time, between man and his surroundings.

The exhibition was curated by Urs Stahel.