TAN

The photographs of the seriesTAN( Water damage) were produced by Richard Dumas on February 5, 1994, on the morning of the fire in the Parliament of Brittany, while the paintings or fragments which had been saved from the flames by the firefighters were evacuated to the surrounding sidewalks.s.
At the end of 2015, Olivier Mellano created an original musical work around this series of ten photographs. This sound and visual encounter is the subject of an exhibition in March 2016 at the Musée de Bretagne in Rennes.s.

The object-booke
We especially know the work of portrait painter of Richard Dumas. The look he poses for TAN is introspective and transcends paintings rescued from flames and waters. Olivier Mellano drew on images to compose a contemporary piece, imbued with music that is both concrete and contemplative.e.

TAN consists of a 30cm vinyl record and ten high quality 30 x 30cm reproductions printed in tri-color, gathered in an envelope specially designed for the project..

The leading edition includes an original digigraphic print on baryta paper format 25 x 25 cm numbered from 1 to 10 signed by the artist. to choose from the images oppositee)

Authors
Richard Dumas is an author-photographer, represented by the VU gallery. We see his images in the press(Liberation, The World, Magic orTelerama), or on record covers in particular Imprudencee from Bashung orTo drink from Miossec; He has exhibited many times since the end of the 1980s under the curatorship of Christian Caujolle or Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, he is present in the collections of the FNAC or the Nantes museum.

Olivier Mellano is a composer, improviser, author and has been a guitarist in over fifty groups since the early 90s. He alternates pop-rock projects and compositions for symphony orchestra, electric guitar ensemble, harpsichord, organ, voice or string quartet. His composition work also extends to cinema, theater, dance and literature..

"As time goes by", by Guillaume de Sardes

Whoever has seen a film worn by time retract in a few moments as it passes under the lamp measures how far the modern arts of image are from possessing the supposed durability that reproducibility would confer on them. That a single, dried and yellowed print fades to the point of being unreadable or is accidentally destroyed, a film or digital file disappears, and the photographic work becomes as legendary as so many once famous canvases or frescoes that we only know now. by chronicles or engraving. The small size of the images, the relative modesty of the means implemented to produce them, only accentuate this tendency to dereliction.ion.

Photography therefore participates, by its very essence, in the fragility inherent in all art. By keeping track of the life of the works, exhibited, admired, transported, threatened, she documents their decline as well as their death, a decline and a death which are also hers as a work itself. A photographer who would pass, year after year, in such a country church where very old wall paintings are gradually crumbling, would keep the diary of an announced disappearance, aware perhaps that the bundle of his photographs, locked in a drawer, will be won. itself, and much faster than the anonymous fresco, through oblivion and nothingness.éant.

Nothingness at work: this is what Richard Dumas witnessed in Rennes at the start of 1994, when the classic building of the former Parliament of Brittany was engulfed in flames. As no human life was threatened, and no one seems to have thought of saving the legal papers as a priority, all the management of this singular disaster revolved around the fate of the historical and artistic objects present in number in the palace. The photographer was interested in them. On his pictures, the drama has just taken place. The fire hoses have not yet been rolled. We can guess, off camera, the exhausted firefighters, wondering if they could save the essential, the anxious conservatives, in search of their scattered treasures, and at some distance, the inhabitants of the neighborhood, amazed that this venerable stone building, which they believed to be eternal. , could have burned.ait pu brûler.

The work of the photographer, in these conditions, has something of that of a reporter sent to the scene of a disaster. Should he circulate among the victims he would testify to almost similar scenes. The rhetorical gesture performed by a character on a large canvas now lying on the pavement becomes, through the degradation of the pictorial layer, the last call of a drowning young girl. The suffering of Christ, so often represented for so many centuries, responds here to the torture of blackened supports, to the agony of ravaged materials. These images testify that in the end everything, really everything disappears. Even works of art. This series is therefore part of the secular genre of Vanities. Vanités.

The resolute choice of black and white is consistent with Richard Dumas' desire to be as close as possible to tight framing, the prevalence of detail on overall views, refusing any picturesque or any concession to the decorative. We often find him, although without systematism, in his portraits, a genre of which he is the French master; but also in a series of street shots taken in Tokyo, and exhibited recently, where the dry minerality of buildings, the hard lines of bare branches, the icy shine of car chrome, all captured in shadows and shades of gray, compose a almost abstract and unhospitable setting.ier.

No sorrow, however, in this series from Rennes despite its subject. On the dark black background of coals and soot simulate images of obstinate survival, in the absence of triumphant life. A thin stream of water escapes from a large pipe, symbol of a vitality decidedly impossible to contain. A little figure in a painting that has become illegible, mysteriously preserved or hastily restored, we do not know, remains luminous and almost cheerful. Therefore, how can we not see in all these rooms which, even in poor condition, have been pulled from the flames, the metaphor of human life, with its accidents, its losses, from which we are recovering as best we can?e mal ?

Because there is a paradoxical lightness in this story of a drama, something like the sun which rises again after a long night, like the air which becomes light and fresh again after the heavy breath of the fire has been extinguished. The old world is resolutely no more, its last perfumes, which still floated in the salons of the palace, have evaporated. Yet this is not the end. There are traces of this past that can radiate the present. A detail can still bring up a memory that grips the heart More than sadness or overwhelming, one experiences, looking at the photographs of Richard Dumas, a poignant, sweet and pregnant feeling, which is perhaps very nostalgic.ostalgie.