/ Presented by Claire Bresson
JEUDI AUJOURD'HUI _ Valérie Villeu

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Valérie Villeu, by his profession of liberal nurse, went some years ago to Mrs D. to bring her care. Mrs D. lived alone and was affected by the Alzheimer's disease. The neglected state in which was its apartment made strangely echo to her mental state : tuck of lacks, breaks, holes.
Every room, every object had undergone the damages of its solitary drift: muddled, hoarse, damaged, incomplete, they spoke nevertheless in a intimate way, of the fact that had of the being this person, its taste for the decoration, the sewing.

" One day, afternoon had to be the enactment of a reception, you had prepared four under cups with Russian cigarettes and square of chocolate. What ghost had visited you? For whom was intended this feast? The vision of these preparations had upset me, I saw there there the amusement of a child playing the tea party, but a child believing in a game that it would not leave.

The repetition of movements certainly one thousand times accomplished but intended for another world. " Valérie Villieu, 2005.

During his visits at Mrs D., Valérie Villieu finds, propping up a door, buried in his clothes, 7 small diaries, which made her go through 34 years of her life. Nothing of profoundly close friend, only notes on clothes to be got back in the steam-pressing, singers' names which she had to like, measures to realize her works of sewing.

And then in the course of diaries, the information rarefies, the writing becomes clumsy and notes show the appearance of the confusions of the memory. The solitude is there extreme, the will to hang on to the perceptible reality. The reading of all these notebooks convinced the photographer to bring to light the story of this woman, the suffering which this disease generates.

In a purpose parallel also to communicate on the care of these persons, so that it is more human, better adapted, and always to the listening of the individual.

" I often think that we maintain you, naturally you eat, naturally you are clean, and then? Is it enough for a life? The television seems to reassure a lot of nursing and auxiliary of life who visit the old persons. You don't escape the television, sometimes violent series in front of which I find you, perturbed, invaded by what the screen imposes you.

Do any people you the leash at night think that it could be a remedy in the space, or is it the solitude which we leave behind us by closing your door and which they do not support? Of that to think of it looking surprised giving you to eat with a helmet on ears? " Valérie Villieu, 2005.

JEUDI
AUJOURD'HUI
Valérie Villeu

/ Presented byClaire Bresson
FORMASÁGOK
_ Krisztina Erdei

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Antal Jokesz, Photographer and curator, 2005.

If there exists some sort of “digital boom” in visual communications, which is mani fested in the proliferation of digital images of everimproving r esolution, then Erdei’s work can be traced to this.

In the background of her pictures there is a vision of the present state of civilisation that is not based on the experience of development but rather on the feeling of stagnation and contingency.

The second dimension of the interpretation of her pictures – through the personalities of her models – entails a much more sen sory approach to her environment.

Her work points in the direction of a concept of freedom which is given a particular flavour by the sensitivity so characteristic of women’s identity, and which proves that by now we can hardly speak about a valid expression of the age without including women’s interpretation of the world.

Krisztina Erdei is being naughty; she is a "bad girl" who creates confusion through changing the meaning of images. What the picture is about is not always easy to notice at first sight. She could be a documentarist who uses alternative technique or different exposure time, for instance, and, through this, captures a number of meta-narratives otherwise invisible.

There is a funny, rather weird character to almost all of her photos. As if receiving a different broadcast, or constantly getting spammed while looking at images in a normal mode. Her photos are funny, but beyond grotesque and not ironical, either - maybe we could call them pataphysical daydreaming avoiding normal perceptional experience. However, these pictures are deeply rooted in reality, and this is how she is able to draw the viewer's attention to interesting associations, structural analogies, or pendant thoughts. The fact thus becoming even more bewildering that frequently the creation of these photos is based on the investigation and capturing of unique and anomalous realities of the social, the cultural, or that of lifestyle.

Krisztina Erdei's work consists of very strong photos: troubling and exciting, like the collections of a fashion guru. We could say they present a new generation's visuals and their directives for reality, with a consoling vision that the culture of today, though it is clearly heading somewhere, remains full of unexpected relations, contingencies. The reality copied through Krisztina Erdei's camera is actual, not potential, and it forms a complex, heavily conditioned world employing both model realities and own experience.

Her greatest achievement is to feature not trippy, far-fetched images darting away from the world, but relations that are as inherent in the world as raisins in shortbread; reloaded again and again.

It is not a personal ego trip, but a modal matrix: as if the world was viewed through a display helmet worn 24/7, projecting information on our retinas.

FORMASÁGOK
Krisztina Erdei

/ Presented by Claire Bresson
ABOUT DECLINE _ Gaël Bonnefon

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Here is an used, tense, fatigued world, but that does not die. A universe which remains dying, as eternal one twilight. Tired characters evolve with strength in fat landscapes in the saturated colors. Shaving lights depict those who, of an expressionless commonness, become an ideal.

Gaël Bonnefon, young person studying to the College of the Fine art of Toulouse, redraws in his images this human tension which leads the idea of the effort, the state of threat of a break, an underlying relaxation. Not as a thoughtful act but to describe a simple apprehension of the existence.
The subjects are crushed by an offensive light, surrounded by an environment become unreal, to see metaphoric, revealing them in a latent physiological intensity.

In this newspaper opened to the dramaturgic atmosphere, the photographer demands nevertheless our awakening to be moved of the rabies to live without constraints of the protagonists, unmistakably because they possess the same strength, the same contained but present violence.

They investigate the same universe, they share it up to the end, without precaution nobody it seems. In the limits of the enjoyment, the estrangement, the absence. The frequent custom of the back light and the overexposure also distorts the perception of things.

The characters seem to lose the face, we do not see more than a mass in the human forms.

Then places become us familiar, as so many spaces or brilliant and reassuring moments in the middle of a paradoxical brushing of the beginning of finishing century. But without moral attitude, nor judgment. Just conjugate in the course of shots the fate, the risk, the unconsciousness, the desire.

Observer of an enigmatic everyday life, Gaël Bonnefon tells in its images its nearness to these heroes of one somewhere else float, hero who in a surge wake up in a black and a pure white or roam in a déclinante light.

The used stage setting does not justify any more then the photographic act, the materials and the textures do not inform about a prospect, and the intervention of the story interferes maybe on the muddled experiences of the photographer.

About Decline is the work of one year which crosses possible and unconscious situations for a fiction on places nomads, characters in perdition, events which escape any analysis.

The mixture of sets and body offers a raw shape which obliges us, more than the images which claim to inform, to interest us in the reality of what we see, fragments of visible one seeming innocent.

ABOUT DECLINE
Gaël Bonnefon