PHOTO:Thibaut Cuisset-La Partition Américaine
Thibaut Cuisset’s photographic work deploys itself through successive campaigns and, every time, a different country acts as the object of the series. In these generally quite long campaigns where the location dilutes itself little by little in the shots, no place is left to improvisation or the accidental and even less now that we find ourselves with these campaigns at the antipodes of reporting: a country is not the terrain of a news item which needs to be covered, nor that of a network of hints which needs to be captured, but a collection of landscapes where the classic example reveals itself slowly, through fixed scenes which are like so many hiding-places.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Les Filles Du Calvaire Gallery Archive
In the exhibition “La Partition Américaine” are shown some of the images from Thibaut Cuisset’s research on the American landscape, an unpublished series made before he passed away in 2017. For 30 years, Thibaut Cuisset explored the world to document its landscapes with gentleness and precision. Immediately recognizable, Cuisset’s images patiently capture the specificities of each territory and their contemporaneity, whether they are untouched or inhabited. His gaze, his light, his cinematographic vision and his affinity with painting produce this inimitable “essence of a place” without anecdote, without pathos, and most of the time without character; Cuisset makes “portraits of landscapes” whether in the absolute outside or in the identity of cities. Combining the description with the aesthetic, he gives us the reality of the place and transmits his emotion in front of it. From 2012 to 2015, Thibaut Cuisset made three long trips to the United States, giving his reading of America and with the awareness that photographing this territory is part of the history of art and photography. In an expeditionary movement and from the end of the 19th century, photographers documented the atmosphere of cities, urban modernity and the immensity of nature (Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Ansel Adams…). In the twentieth century, the American journey replaced the artists’ Grand Tour of Europe. Later in 1975, the exhibition “The New Topographics” consecrated the emergence of a new approach to documentary photography and crystallized the research on landscape of a whole generation of photographers. Thibaut Cuisset’s work is a long journey and consists first of all of a true experience of impregnation in which the location “is diluted little by little in the shot”. The capture of the American territory does not escape this method. The artist did not want to cross the country from East to West, “already done” according to him, but instead focused on gathering “pieces” of America, to show the diversity and immensity of its spaces: national parks, rural areas and towns, large American cities and suburbs. Of the six trips initially planned, he was able to make three. The images presented in the gallery are the result of the first two trips, made successively in the fall of 2012, the spring of 2014 and in 2015. During the first trip, Thibaut Cuisset went to the Wild West, that of the pioneers of the conquest of the West and the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-1806). Starting in Fargo (North Dakota), he then travelled through five other states: South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Utah and Colorado. The second trip plunged into the deep south (Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas). Cuisset then confronts the south of the country, its “denser spaces and more secret immensities”. On the third trip he arrived in Las Vegas, crossed the Death Valley and followed the West Coast from Los Angeles, California to Seattle, Washington.
Photo: Thibaut Cuisset, Louisiana, United States, 2014, ADAGP, Paris, 2021, Courtesy Les Filles Du Calvaire Gallery
Info: Les Filles Du Calvaire Gallery, 17 rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, Paris, France, Duration: 9/12/2021-22/1/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:30, www.fillesducalvaire.com
