DENIS MALARTRE
Denis Malartre (1952-2017) was born in Normandy and moved to Paris in 1970 at the age of 18 to work with photographer Daniel Haddad. He experienced the emergence of modern photography of the 1970s and 80s, in the wake of Henri Cartier-Bresson and joined the Viva agency in 1981, but soon realized he is not destined to become news reporter and thought narrative photography had no future. “And, very slowly, photography is dying, suffocated by millions of images, all similar, all submitted to that tiny window onto the world”, he writes in 1986.
Great art lover, his questions are those of modern and contemporary painting and leading him to the French Supports/Surfaces movement (for which the subject of painting is painting itself) which he believes can be transposed to photography.
In 1986, he opens a vast new field of work that was in the making since the very beginning. “I am closing the window in order to see more clearly and approach photography as an object. A sort of objectal relationship“, he explains in a manifesto. This reflection will lead in 1986 and 1987 to an obsessional work of installations and photographs made in two Parisian apartments. During this extremely creative period, he makes non-figurative images (strips of paper hanging from the ceiling or pieces of scotch taped on the wall) which he calls “The Objectal Photographs”. It will be his final work, an opportunity to experiment and intervene on the pictures by scratching the negatives or painting light brush strokes on the strips of paper.
He exhibits this work early 1988 and publishes "Tue-mouches", a selection of texts and photos, for a limited audience. After that, he will completely stop his practice as a photographer. Nearly thirty years later, he thought it was his duty to take his photographs out of their boxes and show his work. In 2017, he had started to prepare an exhibit when a cancer struck him down within two months.
Denis Malartre leaves behind an outstanding body of work, in the path of the Supports/Surfaces movement, which is made of unique vintage silver-gelatin prints made by himself.
SELECTED WORKS
EXHIBITIONS AT THE GALLERY
