ARIÑO Israel, Photography - Guest artist for the 2025 AR[t]CHIPEL festival

Comments on the "La pesanteur du lieu" serie

The day is beautiful, the night is sublime.

Emmanuel Kant

La pesanteur du lieu is a project carried out as part of a creative residency at the Domaine de Kerguéhennec, in Brittany. Kerguéhennec is a contemporary art center featuring over 30 sculptures installed in the middle of the landscape. It is a place charged with memory and meaning, where other artists have left their mark.

The series explores the concept of “place” as an axis of emotional connection through darkness, the limit of the representable and the perception of reality. Night appears as a tool of discovery, mystery and pleasure, as a hieroglyphic space that leads us to imagine something beyond what we actually see. We enter the realm of the mental, of the imperceptible, of discovery.
In short, it's a sensory rather than a reasoned proposition, filled with intangible elements that slowly appear and disappear as you turn the pages.

This work was published with the participation of the Morbihan department as part of Israel Ariño's creative residency at the Domaine de Kerguéhennec from October to November 2016. It also received the support and participation of Galerie VU' and Grisart.

Israel Ariño

Israel Ariño spent two months at the Domaine de Kerguéhennec, in Brittany, during an artist residency. In the region, it is said that an old house, lost in the grounds, only appears at nightfall. He sets off in search of it. The night is conducive to revelations and metamorphoses. His eyes gradually become accustomed to the darkness and discover other dimensions, new densities and temporalities, at the limits of rationality.

La pesanteur du lieu is a nocturnal, dreamlike stroll. Israel Ariño delivers a constellation of sensual and mental visions, sentimental perhaps. His dark, velvety photographs give substance to the darkness, invoking and capturing the emergence of things that manifest themselves in the night, beyond the ordinary, in a disrupted order of the world. They belong to the world of the marvellous, like a tale in which the supernatural blends with reality. Once upon a time, there was... a dark undergrowth, a strange crystal, antelopes frozen in mid-jump, an offered breast, an astonished owl, a house with gleaming windows.

The series, imbued with a sense of mystery, opens a perceptive threshold to discoveries, signs and apparitions, leaving the visitor suspended, on the edge, on the incessant verge of sinking into hallucination.

Caroline Bénichou

Artistic journey

For the past twenty years, I've been exploring photography and its possibilities as an artistic tool through my projects. The wonder of the subject was certainly the starting point for my photographic quest.

Photography is a way of questioning reality and bringing to light experiences that escape reason. My ambition has always been to subvert reality through images, to make us see it as if we were discovering it for the first time, to make visible the intangible aspects of life that everyone can sense but never see. “The real made fantastic by vision” said Brassaï.

I make images that don't describe objects, landscapes or events, that don't tell a story, but seek to reveal tiny fragments of time. I seek to engage in a dialogue with that which is beyond me, which surprises me, which is a source of dreams and desire. I'm fascinated by the in-between territories that elude reason: truth and fiction, the visible and the non-visible, the animate and the inanimate, the living and the inert, the nomadic and the sedentary.

Most of my work stems from an interest in photography's relationship with time, the constant allusion to loss, memory and disappearance. I'm always keen to reconsider the perceptual ambiguity that manifests itself in reality, searching for coincidences between the external forms of the world, the fragility of beings and my own subjectivity.

My recent research has enabled me to take a more dreamlike look at the territory, revealing the image as an evocation, a space for irrational construction, an internalization of vision.

Selected solo exhibitions

2025 La pesanteur du lieu, in the context of the AR[t]CHIPEL festival, Galerie Capazza, Nançay, FR

2019 Voyage en pays du clermontois, Photonaumles, Beauvais, FR
La gravetat del lloc, Tosei Gallery, Tokyo, JP
La gravetat del lloc, Espace JB, Génève, CH
La gravetat del lloc, Box Galerie, Bruxelles, BE

2018 La gravetat del lloc, FiftyDots Gallery, Barcelone, ES
La gravetat del lloc, Zoème, Marseille, FR
La gravetat del lloc, UFCA, Algeciras, ES
Le partage des eaux, Instituto Cervantes, Toulouse, FR
Le partage des eaux, Institut Français, Barcelone, ES

2017 Atlas, Espai 22, Girone, ES
La pesanteur du lieu, Librarie des Halles, Niort, FR

2015 Le temps éparpillé 1995-2015, Galerie VU, Paris, FR
Le nom qui efface la couleur, Promenades Photographiques, Vendome, FR
Le temps éparpillé 1995-2015, l'Imagerie, Lannion, FR

2014 Le nom qui efface la couleur, Le Moulin de la Filature, Le Blanc, FR

2013 Atles i altres cartografies. Galeria Tagomago, Barcelone, ES

2012 Terra Incognita. Aparté lieu d’art contemporain, Domaine de Trémelin, Iffendic, FR
L’explorateur et les caprices du hasard. Le Carré Amelot, La Rochelle, FR

2010 Crónicas de un desembarco. Itineraires photographiques voyageurs, Bordeaux, FR
Secuencias y Crónicas de un desembarco. Festival Mapamundistas, Pampelune, ES

2009 Images d’un monde flottant et Un jardin à Vitré. Galerie de l’Artothèque de Vitré, FR