Saturday, September 24th - Sunday, November 27th
Collégiale Saint-Pierre-le-Puellier, Orléans

Three photographic perspectives

Eric Antoine
Jérémie Lenoir
Robert Charles Mann

The opening will take place on Saturday, September 24th at 11am, in presence of the artists
The Collegiale Saint-Pierre-le-Puellier is open from Tuesday to Sunday, from 2 to 6pm.

The Collegiate Church of Saint-Pierre-le-Puellier is a place of great architectural richness, so we have designed a sober scenography, so that the works and the place can serve each other. Eric Antoine, Jérémie Lenoir and Robert Charles Mann are three photographers with very specific backgrounds and approaches, three men who each offer a poetic vision of the world, helping us to move from the outside in. The practice of photography is a particular choice, that of giving to see through one's own eyes. It is also, in the case of these three artists, an adventure in its own right, allowing them to combine an intellectual and plastic proposal with a technical and pragmatic research. They are therefore perfectly in line with the line we defend at the gallery, namely an artistic expression that combines gesture and thought. May each visitor dive into these universes with as much wonder as we do. Laura et Denis Capazza-Durand

Eric Antoine

Born in 1974, Eric Antoine is a French self-taught photographer. For more than 10 years, he has concentrated his work on the ancient technique of wet collodion. Each step is managed by the artist, from the preparation of the chemistries to the final framing, through the multiple constraints of a capricious technique. Everything is a singular alchemy, and the use of primitive photographic optics reinforces the feeling of absence and quietude in his photographs. These images of a rare finesse, on glass, fragile result of a laborious work, firmly but poetically counter the contemporary "digital deluge". 

We find in his exhibitions recurring themes: The flight of time, the artistic and existential quest for simplicity. Fragments of reified bodies rub shoulders with anodyne everyday objects raised to the rank of jewels. Then the circle among other symbols imposes itself in his work. Objects/actors are staged in single frame films. The light of his forests appears in obsessively repeated images through the seasons. Layers of leaves and stacked documents tell of known or imagined lives. 

The question of the materiality of the image remains at the heart of the artist's research. Far from any nostalgia, the wet collodion process is here an emancipating discipline. In a quasi-sculptural approach, he delivers real photographs-objects, shimmering and silvered. 

After Ensemble seul in 2015, he releases Useful Lies in 2021, the second in a series of 5 books. Eric Antoine exhibits his photographs in galleries and museums in France, Europe and the United States.

La Magel - n° 1/8 photography, piezography carbon on paper 50 x 50 cm	Chair de poule - n° 1/8 photography, piezography carbon on paper 50 x 50 cm

Jérémie Lenoir

Born in 1983, Jérémie Lenoir is a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique de Tours and the ESAD d'Orléans where he obtained his DNSEP in 2009.

Aiming at an anthropological approach rather than an objective representation of a truth of the landscape, his photographs propose a singular and sensitive journey in what Marc Augé named the "non places". Influenced as much by the artists of the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf as by the abstract expressionist painters (or Noland, Tapiès, Soulages, Malevitch...), his work attempts a representation of reality and its transfiguration into paintings.

He is the author of Transfigurations (2011), NORD (2016) and DUST (2018) for which he received the HIP prize. He is notably the winner of the Bourse Mécène et Loire, the Prix de la SCAM, the Prix de l'A.M.E and the Prix Ecoutez-Voir.

Plate-forme, Hoek van Holland, 2021 - n° 1/5 photography, direct print on Dibond 120 x 120 cm	Stockage, Duisburg, 2020 - n° 2/5 photography, direct print on Dibond 120 x 120 cm

Robert Charles Mann

As soon as Robert, at the age of eight, made his first print in his father's darkroom, he understood the magic photography even before he had taken his first photo.
His mother a concert pianist and father a photographer, Robert grew up in an artistic world with his interests spread equally between photography and music.

He attended the Ohio State University School of Music, Musicians Institute in Hollywood, and Pacific Northwest Film Scoring Program in Edinburgh and also studied at the Maine Photographic Workshops and the Fine Print Studios of the Düsseldorf Museum.

During the 1980’s Robert was involved with many experimental music and performance art projects in Los Angeles incorporating visual installations.

He started photographing for Exposure Magazine and concurrently took on the role of studio manager and exclusive printer for Herb Ritts producing all of his early books and editorial work.

He soon became one of the most sought after photographic specialists in Los Angeles printing the work of Helmut Newton, Mary Ellen Mark, Dennis Hopper, Peter Lindbergh and Sheila Metzner among many others.

His work also includes producing prints for Twelve Tree & Twin Palms photographic books as well as the Hollywood Archives. During the years 80's and 90's Robert produced over one million prints.

In 1989, with an international reputation in photography and photographic printing, Robert moved to Paris (France). Today his work is made primarily with pinhole cameras and traditional noble metal based printing techniques that achieve his particular photographic vision.

Robert is currently producing a new series of twenty solargraph pinhole images with hand made cameras exposing the sun's path for six months.

Installed in the USA and France on the solstice on June 21, each one will be retrieved on the solstice December 21 and prints will be produced soon after.

The photographs of Robert Charles Mann are currently in private and public collections internationally.

Solargraph 20180621-11 - n° 1/3 photographic pinhole 120 x 120 cm	Solargraph 20200621-05 - n° 3/15 photographic pinhole 60 x 60 cm