"Indeed, for more than ten years, Catherine Poncin has been "re "making stories, lives perhaps, to such an extent that sometimes one can think that she is looking for an exchange in what she communicates, tells. For all that, it is not so sure, because if there is an exchange, Catherine does not speak to us directly, her story is already told, she has already lived it on her side, and it is up to the spectator to invent another one for him."
1996-2006, that is to say ten years of collaboration with Catherine Poncin, more than a dozen personal works or works resulting from commissions and invitations and already six publications have given us the desire to devote an important exhibition time to her with a retrospective of these ten years in Brussels and an exhibition of two recent series within the framework of the Month of Photography in Paris, whose theme, the printed page, suits her work perfectly. And the fact that she uses her favorite term "image by image" as a generic title perfectly illustrates her artistic project.
Indeed, this particular artist tells stories without having recourse to the written word because she has invented her own writing through the photographic field, taking as her main raw material the images of others. Paul Ardenne rightly calls this writing post-photographic because she "re-creates" a work from fragments of pre-existing images that she selects from a pile of images gleaned from community, museum and press archives, from corporate or family collections, or even from flea markets or even, abroad, during research trips and contacts that she may incite, sometimes, through classified ads.
The resulting stories seem to re-qualify this material, to give a different virtue to these micro-fragments whose nature the artist transforms by enlarging them, giving them an unspeakable but powerful quality, both formal and narrative. The deep meaning of these narratives remains distant, however, because it is undoubtedly intrinsic to the creator's universe and because the viewer finds himself baffled by a sort of dialectical referral of the potential charge of the image to a possible filiation, belonging, to the personal history of each individual.
Indeed, for more than ten years, Catherine Poncin has been "re "making stories, lives perhaps, so much so that sometimes one can think that she is looking for the exchange in what she communicates, tells. However, it is not so sure, because if there is an exchange, Catherine does not speak to us directly, her story is already told, she has already lived it on her side, and it is up to the spectator to invent another one for him. The story is there, at his disposal, as long as he starts again from his own, from his own memories and feelings of the big and the small story. There is moreover, as often, error on the interpretation of this work for the one who wants to understand without feeling, without involving himself. Sometimes, one can thus judge that this work is of the order of the cenotaph since it starts from memorial traces, of a re-use of what "was". But this is a contradiction, because it is a rebirth and not a memory ad-memorium which is celebrated, it is a second or even a third life (if one takes into account that of the spectator) which are engaged with each presentation.
Moreover, I sometimes wonder, when Catherine tells me about her more than personal investment and her intense way of approaching a work that is largely based on encounters with spirits and emotional charges that she suddenly feels invested with, if, like a shaman, she does not possess a kind of therapeutic, even quasi-mystical resurgence power of our memory and our buried desires. A bit like the witches of the old days who were burned in the past because their virtues were not understood and who, nowadays, have so many admirers.
And it is not insignificant that the artist is often solicited to revive an archive, the history of a city or a social stratum, like a healer of this memory in perdition which we do not know what to do with, despite its vital importance.
The two series presented in Paris are the result of two commissions: Du champs des hommes, territoires, commissioned by the City of Bobigny and Palimpseste, commissioned by the Château Fernay Voltaire. They evoke very different histories, one urban and social, the other intellectual and humanistic, but in both cases the signature is elegantly present.
Indeed, beyond this strange and endearing character that this artist has come to embody over the years for those who frequent her, what results is a formally magnificent work that multiplies tenfold the strength, power and beauty of photography. In recent years, the image has gone from a luminous black and white baryta grain to the use of color, but always in an explosion of matter, in the use of flaws, discolorations and wounds of the image as if the defect were more significant than the subject itself. The association of images in diptychs, triptychs, horizontal or stratified polyptychs creates the narrative thread, the mise en scène one might say. We are not far from the idea of pre-cinematographic scenarios that tempt so many photographers, but I believe that the silence of the image, yet so voluble, confers a privileged status to this work among the abundance of contemporary images, investing it with an existential dignity, with an unspeakable aura, so particular to this work.
Christine Ollier