When I first walked down the rue Quincampoix some years ago it was lined with young (and some not so young) ladies who pouted invitingly at me as I went by, but now their place has been taken by art galleries, and the area has lost a little of it’s decadent charm.
In the basement of Galerie Impressions, below the bookshop, we were met by photographer Loïc Trujillo. The gallery is dedicated to work by Asian artists or those who have worked in Asia, and for the Photo-Off was showing his work ‘instants de vie‘, pictures from the holiest of Hindu cities, Vârânasi (Benares) on the Ganges.
Wealthy Hindus from all over the world bring there dead to be cremated on the slopes (ghats) by the river. Bodies are wrapped in cloth and bathed in the river before being burnt with wood on a funeral pyre. The morning after, the ashes are raked through to find any objects of value and then cerimonially scattered on the river with flower petas and other offerings. The sacred water of the Ganges is said to have the power to erase the sins of the deceased, liberating them from Samsara, the eternal cycle of reincarnation and allowing them to rest in peace for eternity.
Although I’ve seen other photographs and film of the events there, Trujillo’s work still impressed.
A little further down the street we came to ‘Someday we’ll all be free‘ at Gilles Peyroulet & Cie, a show of varied work around the theme of conflict and war, with images from more or less the whole of the twentieth century, where the curator took us through the whole show at some length. Although some of the work on display was of interest (and parts somewhat horrific, with one series of pictures showing a man undergoing barbaric torture, and also included were some official photographs of the Nazi concentration camps) I didn’t feel the show really produced anything coherent other than an easy condemnation of inhumanity.
Next we made our way to the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in the rue St Martin, opposite Beauborg itself, which was showing, Les (in)contrôlés, a group exhibition of work previously shown in the 2010 Liege Biennial on the theme (out of) control. This was the only one of the galleries that had made no arrangement for our visit, perhaps because it was a basically a show from elsewhere, but also possibly because none of the staff concerned with the exhibitions works on a Saturday. This is not a commercial gallery but some kind of official venue to promote the interests of French-speaking Belgium.
This wasn’t a show I particularly warmed to, and some of the work – such as the well over life-size female body-builders by Martin Schoeller (a German photographer who was an assistant to Annie Leibovitz in the 1990s before taking portraits for Rolling Stone, Vogue, the New Yorker and other magazines) I found repulsive, although in part that was because of the contrast – which fascinated the photographer – between their bodies and their faces.
Joyce Vlaming‘s series ‘Cellblock’ addressed the theme very directly, and her pictures, though in some senses very effective were just too cold and clinical to have much attraction for me. Perhaps too the chilling image by Nicolas Clément of a security guard and his guard do at night, ‘security Partagee‘ was just too direct an interpretation of the theme. I was certainly happier looking at the ‘autoportraits‘ by Melissa Desmet and the portraits of Patrick Van Roy.
‘Les Boules‘ by Nathalie Noël, pictures of glass domes encasing icons of traditional family values provided a little amusement, as too did the impossible situations of Tilman Peschel‘s ‘Revolution.’
Then it was back to the rue Quincampoix, or rather a courtyard off from it, for the Galerie Orel Art, a large space with a group show of Russian portrait photography from 1970-2010, with work by Nicolai Bakharev, Valery Schekoldin, Lialya Kuznetszova, Sergei Tchilikov, Oleg Kulik, Igor Mukhin, Sergey Leontiev, Igor Savchenko, Arsen Savadov, Sergey Maximishin, Olga Kisseleva, Evgeny Mokhorev, Vlad Mamyshev-Monroe, Valery Nistratov & Jason Eskenazi, Alla Esipovitch, Oleg Dou, Dasha Yastrebova, Irina Popova, Margo Ovcharenko and Tanya Leshkina. You can see the work of some of them on the Russian Tea Room site, as well as on the Orel Art site, which seems very slow to load. I was particularly impressed by the black and white work of Mukhin and Schekoldin from the 1970s and 80s, but much of the work was of interest.
Finally we made it to Le Nouveau Latina and an exhibition in the upstairs cafe lounge at this cinema in rue du Temple, where we were met by Dom Garcia who introduced us to ‘Black Lights’ his black and white portraits of his friends around the wall, accompanied by Olivier BKZ’s texts. You can get a good idea of Garcia’s work from a page on SDH. It was another show I enjoyed that unless I had gone on the guided walk I would probably have missed.
The Noveau Latina looked like a good place to have tea, but unfortunately we were short of time as we needed to go back to the hotel and change before going out to meet Linda’s brother and his wife for a meal. We had decided to pay another visit together to Chartier and had arranged to get there early to miss the large queues that build up later. Chartier has certainly gone down a bit since we first ate there years ago, but it’s still a part of Paris past not to be missed, even if our waiter did this year use a calculator. We walked straight in but by the time we had finished our meal and left to go elsewhere for a drink the queue stretched all the way down the street to the boulevard.