Rémanence

Les histoires sans paroles (Wordless Stories) by Yves Piedbœuf

The uncanny or unheimliche - that famous yet fragile Freudian concept - has surely already been put to all sorts of uses, including in the great photographic kitchen. This skilful blend of the strange and the familiar, the near and the unattainable, the never seen and the already there, is neither an empty word nor a vain mixture when one looks at Yves Piedbœuf’s photos.

First and foremost, perplexity kicks in. Something has taken place, but what? Next to nothing is about to happen or to be said, but how? The moment seems on the verge of escape, but when? In this seemingly classic photograph, in this 24 x 36 black and white that one might conveniently refer to as the “decisive moment”, something indecisive stubbornly persists and constantly deviates. Like a tenuous light, a fleeting memory - a reminiscence, an afterglow even, a beautiful word that gives the series its allusive title.

Things seem simple, but often seem to lack an essential complement: a legend or an explanation; context or a setting; an arm itself, or a head, or both; or an interlocutor. And it is from this incomplete, lacunar aspect that this sequence, which is not a sequence, draws its intriguing side. Like a play on off-camera to which no subsequent shot would provide the key; like a play on the timeless, making the image difficult to date; like an imprecision even through the details, from which an intimate and universal dimension emerges. 

This play - because there is some of this in Piedbœuf’s work, even more so in his photos than in his paintings - cannot accommodate staging or premeditation. A spontaneous je-ne-sais-quoi manages to capture the tragedy of the ephemeral, the unaccomplished, the transitory. It could quickly turn into an obsession; in fact, there is no doubt that it is turning into one. So many things are no longer there but are still there, you know: desire or the light of a star, a perfume after closing one’s eyes, a glow despite the disappearance… A magic, a familiar magnetism. Sketched tenderness or contained violence.

Perhaps it all means nothing - but in life, do we only say what we want?
Perhaps we should look at these images with a painter’s eye and a child’s soul.
Perhaps it is more important that an image be a bearer of perhaps, more than of words, explanations or certainties…

Emmanuel d’Autreppe, exhibition curator, April 2021
Translation: Louise Jablonowska

© Yves Piedbœuf, sans titre, 2018, (60 x 80 cm) (90 x 120 cm) / © Yves Piedbœuf, sans titre, 2007, (60 x 80 cm) (90 x 120 cm) / © Yves Piedbœuf, sans titre, 2017, (60 x 80 cm) (90 x 120 cm)