LES OBJECTALES • DENIS MALARTRE

FROM 7 NOVEMBER TO 10 NOVEMBER 2024
PARIS PHOTO 2024, “PRISMS” SECTOR

Disillusioned with photography as it was practiced in his time, Denis Malartre (1952-2015) isolated himself in an apartment over a two-year period between 1986 and 1988, in an attempt to deconstruct photography and create a new visual vocabulary. His “manifesto” work, in the tradition of the Supports/Surface movement, but also close to "art brut" in its modus operandi, is made up of fifty unique vintage silver prints, and offered exclusively at Paris Photo as an indissociable whole.

Denis Malartre left Caen in 1970, at the age of 18, to work in Paris, where he experienced at first hand the emergence of modern photography in the 1970s and 80s under the influence of Henri Cartier-Bresson. In 1981, he joined the firm Viva, founded by eight photographers ten years earlier. This collective of author-artists, rather than a press agency, gave him complete freedom in his practice. As an avid art-lover, his questions were closer to those of modern and contemporary painting. They led him to the French Supports/Surfaces movement, which he felt he could transpose to photography.

A trip to New York in 1986 made a lasting impression on him, and opened up a new field of work: “I close the window to see more clearly, and use photography as an object. A kind of objectal relationship”, he wrote in a manifesto shortly after his return. For two very creative years, he experimented with photography as a plastic medium (scratching negatives or using brushstrokes on strips) and produced a series of non-figurative images, the fruit of obsessive installation and shooting, which he entitled Les Objectales. Also akin to "art brut" in its modus operandi, this photographic series differs from the photography of its time: here, photography becomes a purely optical object, a surface, a trace.

This manifesto series, produced between 1986 and 1988, comprises fifty unique vintage silver prints by the artist, offered exclusively at Paris Photo as an indissociable whole.

“I use photography as an object, as a sort of objectal relationship”
Denis Malartre