The gallery presents a solo exhibition of Marcel Dinahet, echoing those of the Abbaye de Maubuisson and the Domobaal gallery in London. An anthological monograph will be published in December by Lienart. This work is the result of a co-production between the Criée in Rennes, the FRAC Alsace, the FRAC Bretagne, the Centre d'art contemporain de Sète, the Abbaye de Maubuisson and the gallery Les filles du calvaire. This set of exhibitions and this monograph, which retraces more than twenty years of creation and travel, will allow us to approach the depth of this singular work in which the aquatic element is almost always the founding context of the work.
Indeed, for more than twenty years Marcel Dinahet has been recording the movements of the sea, in a multitude of amphibian captures or floats of his half-submerged camera, either filming a body in immersion, or the film becomes the direct transcriber of a surprising landscape at the limit of the horizon. It is not really a landscape in the usual sense, but rather a maritime perception of a strip of land with undecided limits that undulates between water and air, affected by a random movement induced by the current or the wave - a kind of mental game between point of view and counterpoint, field and off-field.
From his carefully studied journeys, he brings back surprising images that escape, at first sight, any documentary or narrative logic. Recorded by a camera often entrusted to the elements, to the movements of the sea or to those of the body moving on foot or in a car, they have a physical impact on the viewer. Seeming to translate this "vision without gaze" of which Virilio speaks, they restore an experience of the spaces crossed, experienced rather than seen.
And if the reported images are out of the ordinary, always at the border of reality and fiction, they are at the same time simple and poetic, raw and sensual. Thereafter, the artist multiplies their effectiveness tenfold according to the montages he makes from sequence shots that can last from one minute to several hours. In a second phase, that of an exhibition rather than that of a simple projection, he implies to see "immerses" directly the spectator in devices being able to include several screens or several projections as well as various heights of visual and sound perception. The space of presentation influencing itself on the conception of the installation.