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Exposition Guy Tillim/Second Nature

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Intriguing new work from one of South Africa’s most celebrated photographers

Photographic images that challenge our perception of landscape

‘Art that is both beautiful and thoughtful… Guy Tillim achieves both’ – Mail and Guardian Online

The photographs that Guy Tillim made last year in French Polynesia and São Paulo bring these locations into sharp focus but are devoid of specific emphasis. The weather conditions on a misty Tahiti volcanic beach are depicted in extraordinary, almost palpable detail, but the image shows no traces of the usual idiom for depicting a tropical idyll. After all, this island exists in the Western imagination in terms of its remote, exotic location, dazzling beaches, azure waters, and dusky naked beauties. Guy Tillim, however, gives a new context to this landscape.

The fact that so many artists have tried to depict the Polynesian landscape, ever since Captain James Cook’s voyages of the late eighteenth century, was exactly what attracted Tillim. But Tillim follows no footsteps, and he avoids every cliché. He seeks, rather, to record his own perceptions – an almost impossible task: »In making photographs of the landscape, I have to confront the difficulty of actually seeing the landscape. » Is it even possible to sidestep the idiom that has formed one’s own imagination? Tillim does so by framing not details or monumentality, but the space between them, a space whose everyday nature is revealed. Within his chosen frame there is a perfect democracy. « What is photographed? » writes Tillim. « Nothing, and everything, when you have no desire to leave the frame. »

As a modernistic counterpoint to his photographs of Polynesia, in late 2011 Guy Tillim travelled to São Paulo – a city that has also been much extolled, filmed, and described, and which is the subject of numerous poems. Here, too, Tillim has sought a new way of photographing a city of which it has been said that ‘its total absence of personality has become its personality.’ Guy Tillim approaches this metropolitan landscape in the same way he approaches Polynesian nature: « I show a sort of indeterminate area. The things that we don’t notice, as they are quotidian things. They contribute as much to the landscape as the other things. »
It is his unique photographic approach, which constantly depicts his subjects anew, that allows Guy Tillim to push back the borders of our own perceptions.

Guy Tillim will be present at the opening of Second Nature in Huis Marseille. On Saturday 3 March he will give a guided tour of the exhibition, together with Federica Angelucci, co-owner of the STEVENSON gallery in Cape Town.

Copyright image: Guy Tillim
Rua Sete de Abril
2011
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