1,2,3, SOLEIL !

ERIC GUGLIELMI / JONAS DELHAYE

1, 2, 3, Soleil !

Waiting, counting, gathering.

1, 2, 3, Soleil !

Advancing, immobilizing, contemplating.

1, 2, 3, Soleil !

Our childhood games evoke both a contemplative state and constant lookout, which can be found in the artworks of photographer Eric Gugliemini and visual artist Jonas Delhaye. When searching for their targets, the wait, with time suspended in the face of their prey: images.

Waiting primarily comprises the preparation of their materials (installing the laden darkroom for Gugliemi, or creating a site-specific pinhole camera for Delhaye). It involves preparing their eyes and preparing their surroundings. For Gugliemi, a single shot can consume an entire day’s work. Waiting for ideal light conditions, for the artist’s body that has become a living camera to assimilate the landscape, to become tamed by his surroundings, and forget himself.

For Delhaye, deliberately creating his camera is as important as the shot itself, while he gleans objects, particles, materials, and dust, all of which he gathers to create pinhole cameras. For the Sainte-Barbe military shooting range, for example, fragments of bombshells and bones become materials through explosion. Armed with his new camera, Jonas Delhaye returns to the sites where material had been gathered and takes pictures of them. Like an x-ray, photographic traces thus appear of all locations (military infrastructure, target boards, flight logbooks, bunkers) along with matters which compose them (in the camera’s internal structure). Starting points and destinations are confounded in a mise-en-abyme.