FUNDAMENTALS

"So I said to myself - I'll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it."

Georgia O’Keefe

In certain Japanese clubs one can see striptease of a new kind: the women spread their labia at eye level for ‘oculist witnesses’ wanting to know more about the ‘origin of the world’. It is about seeing further into what happens intra-utero, going back in time, forgetting what is longed for.
Photography is a silent and solitary ecstasy. It is the illusion of looking somewhere else at the déjà vu. How can we focus on sexual organs after Mapplethorpe, Warhol, Toscani and so many others?
Étant donné the waterfall and the illuminating gas, is there another way of exploring the lost world?
By bringing his lens in very close, de Cugnac curiously establishes a certain distance, tricking us with what we thought we had already seen. His enormous prints turn us into Lilliputian astronauts.
As a result, the enigmatic centre of attraction becomes a crater, an abyss, a geyser, an indent, and the black skin all around is a desert scattered with moist reeds.
With the form of a fig, a mussel, an oyster, a false wound, the indefinable frontier between inside and outside is emphasized through aesthetic references.
There is blackness, darkness and funereal coldness, recalling Soulages, Degottex and Fontana. The sober Zen quality of these works filters our perception, ‘deporning’ it and carrying us off into a cosmic dream.
Astonishment and fascination at the gaping hole, with the ultimate revelation that can only lead to nothingness: such is the mirror that de Cugnac offers us from the depths of his darkroom as he endeavours in vain to get down to fundamentals.



Dothy SOLIMAN, art critic
September 2002





Translated by Jordan Greenwood and Michael Novy