Seven views of the Sainte-Victoire Mountain - 2019
by Michel Bousquet
- Printed in France
Technique: photography
Exhibition available in 2 formats for outdoor use and 1 format for indoor use.
The signs, the information that each of us grasps when faced with a landscape (whatever it may be), depend on our interests, our history, our projects, the strategies that we develop to understand an environment in space and time.
"The photographs in the series Seven Views of the Sainte-Victoire Mountain come from work carried out during a residency in 2019 in Aix en Provence and which I then entitled "Archives of Aix en Provence": still lifes, studio views and landscapes of the Sainte-Victoire.
(…)
In the morning, I photographed still lifes in the studio that had been made available to me. I then widened the scope and photographed the studio. In the afternoon, I went walking around the Sainte-Victoire mountain, starting at the beginning of the Tholonet road and then, more and more often, from Cézanne's cabin at the Bibémus quarries.
(…)
I knew that the Sainte-Victoire was represented more than 80 times by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and that he had, through his work, opened a path towards abstraction...
At the Granet Museum in Aix-en-Provence, I found "French archives", a book bringing together images by the American photographer Harry Callahan (1912-1999) taken during his stay in the city in 1957/1958: landscapes, street images, still lifes, special treatments of contrasts, superimpositions...
I had long been interested in the viewpoints, compositions and colours of the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) and had read that he had discovered Cézanne's work through black and white reproductions…
The photographer doesn't just record what's in front of his lens. He confronts landscapes with his own history, his thoughts, his expectations, his concerns as a creator.
• Outdoors: choose locations where people take a walk and/or where there is a lot of foot traffic: in the centre of the town, near a school, in a public garden or along a walking trail... And if possible, on flat ground!
• Indoors: reception hall, office, waiting room, dining room, meeting room - choose the best-lit space.
CAUTION: If the space where you are displaying the exhibition is slightly damp, we recommend purchasing eight simple frames of the same size (50 x 70 cm) to protect the prints.
The papers we have chosen for printing our exhibitions meet two essential criteria, among others: beautiful colour rendering and durability.
• Exhibitions intended for outdoor display are printed on high-quality 130gsm blue-backed paper.
• For exhibitions intended for indoor display, we have chosen a 550gsm semi-rigid paper to which we attach a simple hanging system. These panels can therefore be hung on a single nail or framed if they are to be displayed in a slightly damp location.
For outdoor displays, our poster formats have been chosen to best suit “election” billboards:
• Large outdoor format (84 x 119 cm) for maximum impact. With one poster per billboard, you will need eight in total.
• Small outdoor format (63 x 93 cm) so that two posters can be placed on the same billboard... meaning you only need to install four billboards.
• Indoor exhibition (50 x 70 cm): 8 prints to hang on 5 linear metres of free wall space.
Full view of the exhibition
