Between Earth and sky | Tandem | Films

Outdoors, Corinne Mercadier invites us to share in the staging of one of her photography sessions.

About

Synopsis

Outdoors, Corinne Mercadier invites us to share in the staging of one of her photography sessions. She is drawn to people and objects in motion, while remaining open to chance events, to produce her dreamlike photographs.

The artist

Corinne Mercadier was born in 1955.
She is a photographer and lives and works in Paris.
She is represented by the Filles du Calvaire gallery.

Technical data

Director	Sandra Städeli
Cinematographer	Thomas Rousillon
Editor	Guillaume Germaine
Music composer	Thomas Spicq
Duration	06:10

Chronicle

Corinne Mercadier's work is an eternal flight. It draws its forms from the frontiers of sculpture, drawing and dance. Her spaces are those of Renaissance painting and perspective, the choreographic studio and the theatrical stage. Photography is their vessel. It is the heart, the magical instant when the formal and poetic elements are crystallized in an image. Without this moment of accomplishment, the staged bodies, sculptures and objects would remain inert, lifeless. In this work, the poetic element meets the photographic to capture an ephemeral image, fixed for eternity. It always moves according to a new inspiration where pictorial and philosophical references intersect with the landscape, the forms imagined by the artist and the movement with which she infuses her models. The relationship to their bodies is predetermined by the costumes with which they propel themselves towards objects projected into the scenic space that the landscape has become.

Sandra Städeli illustrates this encounter between reality and creation, between bodies and space, when filming one of Corinne Mercadier's productions from the series Le ciel commence Ici (The sky begins Here) on her favourite playing field, the salt flats of Bages-Sigean lake. The spaces of the film and of the photography are astonishingly intertwined. The director has slipped into the artist's creative universe and shows her at work, photographing the moving silhouettes from the top of her ladder, directing the models and throwers of objects according to the time and the light. Putting the shoot into perspective through film provides an ‘off-frame’ vantage point that enables us to discover the full extent of the shoot and the significance, however indescribable, of the photographic instant.

The radicalism of the relationship to movement, emptiness and the pre-emption of space are palpable in the film, as if Corinne Mercadier were using the technique of choreographic notation to direct the shoot and transform it into a scene of experimentation akin to performance. The momentum thus created is, in the end, a choreographic work. Photography is its scenic framework, for which reality provides settings open to the imagination of an artist fascinated by the infinite.

Christine Ollier

Christine Ollier is an art historian and exhibition curator in the fields of contemporary art and photography. Since 2017, she has devoted herself to planning cultural events, publishing critical texts and artistic consulting for artists and collectors.