Indo French Glances Exhibition Catalogue
10/24/2007 , By Elizabeth Rogers
As the second phase of the project Regards Croisés takes place in Chandigarh, relevant questions arise on the nature of photography to record, transmit and communicate architecture and its site-specific ramifications. Ode to jyotsna, or light of consciousness, photographs of Diwan Manna and Michel Dieudonné capture respective visions of Le Corbusier in Firminy and Chandigarh.
A conjunction of awareness, the lexicon and metaphorical vocabulary of the architect, unfolds through the images caught through these two different individual’s lenses. Like mathematical proofs, assigning symbols to energy, such protean stratagems of concrete and intangible congeal. Difficult to analyze the extent to which one’s work is inspired by that of another, to unravel the embrace of the harmonious chords played through another medium. Each render the humanist dimensions of space, form, colour and light in confluent compositions of tonal interplay and shadows.
How does one church compare with an entire city, save for the role of comforting, embracing the dimensions of the human condition – yet a shared material, concept of light and concrete matter. Connection in this project as Martine Dancer has cited to be the timeliness of the realization of Chandigarh and the drafting of the plans for the Saint-Pierre Church in Firminy.
Diwan Manna, the Chandigarh based photographer, studied painting and explores realms and “depicts the possibility of crossing borders” between entities and disciplines, let alone media. Known for his work in experimental and conceptual photography, as an artist-in-residence for several weeks in Firminy, he created his series entitled “Master of Light”. These works bear a testimony to abstraction, dots of colour and light, at the time of the completion of the construction of the church of Saint-Pierre. There is a theatrical facet to such imagery, a sense of momentary drama, completely alive and in the throes of movement from an almost atomic level.
Seen in the images Master of Light are shadow reflections of what resembles at once a church’s spires (not of this eglise’s style), the tubular stalactite pipes of an organ or the flame-like tongues of an erect fire. Manna endows this concrete edifice with the life and light, which the architect envisioned; he enables it not only to breath, but also to sing and dance. Other renditions of such illumination depict parallel figures, in which crosses of light are geometric; in some a gyroscope of light bridges the inner space of the edifice.
Reminiscent of son and lumiere ceiling montages in planetariums, or astronomical phenomena witnessed in the skies such as the Pleaidean meteor showers, certain of Manna’s photographs capture a stellar curve of circles and seeming ellipses through which light pass. His shots of visitors to the Church gazing upon these luminous plays and sequential rectangles of the palette connect with the work of the artist James Turrell who is considered a contemporary ‘light master’. Lunar opalescence, pearl grey and tinges of fuschia cross the picture frame. The coloured interior walls, for which Le Corbusier was recognized, bring to mind paintings by the Russian constructivists and the abstract expressionists.
So, the cross regard of this project took the French photographer Michel Dieudonné to Chandigarh, the city of “Sun, Space and Verdure”. His images constitute an apt, albeit distinct, voice for a balanced harmonic. Aside from his more urban quotidian images, Dieudonné’s work examines the interstice of form and light, the edges of the concrete and the zen-like spaces of the intangible. Another examination of the imagery of light and the protean substratum of organisms. There are a quite a number of triptychs, both of quite a painterly composition and nature. A chiaroscuro permeates these colors, a subtle lighting, whether focused upon apertures or three-dimensional apparitions. Doorways, windows, slivers of space, architectonic and sculptural meet at edges, crystallized in the photographer’s eye.
Le Corbusier’s vocabulary of perspective and organic form, structure and aesthetic together, appear in the elements of space and design (Haute-Cour, Pylônes) of coloured support columns treated as sculptures without beginning or end. In another photograph, Assemblées Intérieurs Musical, the vertical assemblage harkens of the monochrome architectural works of Piranesi and the futuristic old master fantastic worlds of Bosch. An ode to the still life, Haute-Cour, Dedans-Dehors, juxtaposes a signboard, an entrance/exit and a seated newspaper, as if a surreal orchestra at intermission situated itself in front of our eyes.
Architectural significance unfolds as spaces, sites and edifices continue to harbour, entrance and inspire succeeding generations. Just so, that these two photographers journeyed to perceive through their respectively individual mind’s eye two very different sites with two different projects both in scale and conception, yet explored the chromatic hues and spatial configurations of a lasting, relevant visionary.
