"Empty streets, deserted beaches, foggy roads. Silhouettes of anonymous men, shadows. Cars at a standstill, flat tires, folded parasols. In the rain, in the oppressive heat, a strange feeling of the end of the world circulates, suspended, through the images."
These words from Pauline Alioua introducing her series Phantomatic // Nowhere to be seen 1 perfectly capture the atmosphere of her photographed universe, photographed in a very cinematic style in pure and elegant black and white (analog), giving the present an air of eternity… Born in 1986, the self-taught photographer, who now lives and works in Marseille, has already focused her lens in the four corners of the world, on bodies and landscapes that reveal intimate and existential questions in images “oscillating between reality and dreamlike imagery [which] captivate with their narrative and poetic force”.
In Phantomatic, it's a kind of wandering, "a quest. Internal, external" (sic) that we sense in the deserted or abandoned places: there, a close-up of the folds and undulations of a duvet, here, of those of a cliff, there, a fine sandy beach, here, a scorched earth moor or two hats abandoned on the back shelf of a rain-soaked car… They speak to us of absence, the absence of the loved one after the breakup – "a world in shades of gray, stripped of the blinding colors of Love." "The inner collapse opens a space of emptiness, a space
“[…] which offers a possibility of seeing new things, of looking differently, of going elsewhere,” the artist herself writes. Flirting with both abstraction and the absurd, her series X, the Unknown plunges us into other empty spaces. A series that began with images of blank signs encountered on the roads of Bosnia and Hungary, abandoned signs no longer indicating any destination, leaving the traveler to drive toward the unknown…
We see a rectangle of light lining the stairwell of a basement, another white rectangle painted on a wall, intersecting lines—of wood, metal, and smoke—and curved roads, a halo of light at the end of a tunnel, a suitcase abandoned on a road, silhouettes of men seen from behind appearing in silhouette, or a blank screen displaying the fateful "Image not found." All these are images of an "uncanny strangeness" (Freud), or rather "disquiet and uneasy" (to refer, like the photographer, to the author of The Book of...).
(Intranquility 2, Fernando Pessoa), conducive to the emergence of poetry.
1 Series which resulted in the publication of a book available online, on the artist's website, for €20
2 Pub. posth. 1982
FRAGILE (HANDLE WITH CARE) BY PAULINE ALIOUA
LE BAL BOOKS, 2023 – €20
LEBALBOOKS.COM
BACK-TO-INTRO.COM/PHANTOMATIC
@PAULINE.ALIOUA
PAINTINGS OF IRAN BY PAULINE ALIOUA AND CHRIS GARVI
ARNAUD BIZALION PUBLISHER, 2021 – €45
ARNAUDBIZALION.FR
