La part visible

Nathalie Amand, or the backside of the visible… 

Born in 1968, Nathalie Amand teaches at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Tournai. Her first monograph, Parêtre, was published to coincide with the most recent Condroz Photography Biennial in 2019 by Yellow Now (as part of the “Angles vifs” series), and images from it form this, her first exhibition at Contretype: they are more than a synthesis or a retrospective of her work, more a twisting and stimulating diagonal cutting through thirty years of obsessions, questions and wonder. She has always used the traditional film method in medium or large format. Very early in her career she showed a predilection for staged photography and studio set-ups. She creates images of human nature in its most intimate moments (the relationship between bodies, time and space, modesty and identity, finality and absurdity). By celebrating them, twisting them to her own purposes, even sometimes by manhandling them, she draws our attention to the most traditional genres of painting and drawing: nudes and portraits, landscapes and still lifes, details and vanities. 

In addition, the falsely classical play between what is seen and what is silent — or invisible — in her work is more complex than it appears. While the aesthetic and sensual aspects (skin, materials, textures and objects) predominate her research, what Nathalie Amand questions above all is the spectator’s gaze: its position and attitude opposite what is revealed, and which now disappears in a flux of movement, and now displays itself excessively, and which, by other movements, forces us to confront our own fears and our desires to escape, to interpret, to imagine and to seek lightness. 

The visible or mysterious part, the angel’s share (the heady alcohol that evaporates from wine) or the devil’s share, the eye’s share or the cursed part, all that battles and dodges, hesitates and resists, between heaven and earth, between purity and impurity, between the delicate and the nefarious in the photographer’s world. The beauty of objects is often inseparable from their fragility, each light has its dark reverse; presence passes by turning our backs on it, or even to see reality we must close our eyes… It’s about contradictory truths, more internal than visible, much less demonstrable. In Amand’s intimate cosmogony, the great thirst for the absolute passes through little things that her photographic approach is not content merely to observe, but exceeds, sees differently, transforms, transcends; and the most insignificant and delicate, without scratching too much the dream or metaphysics, inviting us to a form of reflection, elevation or meditation… 

What about the sacred? Perhaps yes, but also its opposite, just as much. Terrestrial and incarnate, trivial if need be. And, whereas references abound (for example to the fetishist boudoirs and studios of the nineteenth century, to “Hommages licencieux”; to the surrealists, particularly Ernst; to collage and assemblage; to other great landscape and still-life artists), in the end it favours the clean, the stripped-back without diversion, the essence of a mystery — and finally to an essential absence that is even more difficult to name than it is to reveal or hide. 

Emmanuel d’Autreppe, January 2021
Translation: Chris Bourne

Website: www.nathalie-amand.fr

© Nathalie AMAND, Hommage licencieux n°220, 2016, 12,5 x 10 cm, courtesy Box Galerie, Bruxelles / © Nathalie AMAND, Hommage licencieux n°223, 2016, 12,5 x 10 cm, Courtesy Box Galerie, Bruxelles / © Nathalie AMAND, Hommage licencieux n°1, 1990, 10 x 12,5 cm, Courtesy Box Galerie, Bruxelles.