Magali Joannon
Magali Joannon
(Paris 1972)
An intimate diary of a solitary voyage taken through Camargue and Montenegro. Solitary, because his gaze is kept distant from people, as if hiding his observation of them; almost eavesdropping on their conversation and spying on their movements and interactions, without ever coming into direct contact, for fear or shyness.
Or maybe because these travels are not a vacation, they instead represent a return. The artist seems to go back over certain places in hope of finding something that was lost, to relive extinguished emotions, to give a sense to that which was not fully comprehended. For this, he insists on certain apparently futile details: a window, a tree, an empty bed, an unmade bade, a closed door. All places that could be hints of a past that lives on in memory: a meeting place, a path-way, a passion quickly consumed, perhaps abandon.
The voyage hence mixes in with memory. And here we observe the yellowish-toned photographs, which seem pulled from a drawer after many years and blurred as if they were trying to be saved from the oblivion to which they were inevitably destined. It is as if they are seen through a glass filter that mistakes memory for the present. In conclusion, the photographs of Magali Joannon are ultimately evocative and often extraordinarily intense.