Exhibition review of Daniel Dion’s La tête et les jambes, Oboro, January 8-19, 1985 (Magazine Spirale, n°50, March 1985)
Read moreLast October, the same ensemble of thirty-three smaller photographs was presented simultaneously at Langage Plus in Alma, where Louis Bronsard was in charge of hanging, and in Moncton at Galerie Sans nom. This time, in January at Oboro, Daniel Dion retained only a few shots from the previous series, which he printed in larger format and hung himself. In these final prints, the model’s body emerges from the darkness, from the black background of the image, like an apparition. Cheating the photographic process, the artist leaves the shutter open for a certain length of time, then bombards the dancer, who until then had been moving in the dark, with flashes of light. In this way, he stretches out the photographic time, capturing several moments of the dance on a single frame.
In the photograph, the figure moves through a fictitious space, an artificial staging where the floor and the black background merge. The real space of the dance is in no way characterized, and during the printing process, the laboratory work will erase anything that might have betrayed a specific location. The dancer’s body becomes a form. The photograph renders the event unreal, stopping the dancer’s movement and transforming it into an image for us, the viewers. Contrasts of pure blacks and whites, poses and movements are organized and ordered in the composition in relation to the edges of the frame. The space where the photographer and model meet is systematically squared off, making the image intelligible as such. Doubt sets in, and the event becomes almost entirely image.
Only the time of the photographic shot, inscribed in the superimposed gestures of the model, and the short-circuited time of the image continue to collide. In the latter, the different moments of the dance stubbornly shine through, the imprint of a very real body moving at a given moment in front of the camera. The different poses visible simultaneously allow us to glimpse the movement, and through it, reveal the real time that is passing. This emergence of duration in the image destabilizes the fixity of the photograph. The instant of the photographic shot and the temporal division it creates are stretched to the limit; their decisive power is diminished. Beyond a single moment, it is now the whole dance that is represented in the image. The passage from one ordeal to the next only generates a trampling of meaning, and calls on our imagination to fill a void.
Because of the conditions under which its visibility was transmitted – alternating flashes of light and total darkness – the dance ritual was not made visible to the photographer himself. The clear appearance of the image on the photographs depends on the loss of the initial event. Only a few gestures and, clandestinely, the movement remain fixed on the film. In latency, the real space and time of the encounter between dancer and photographer are totally to be invented and reinvented. Each glance creates the event, eternally to be repeated; it constructs and reconstructs it in all its fragility. Where the photographic image confirms having been there, here nothing can be taken for granted, and the chance encounter of a spectator-tinkerer will attempt to reconstitute the puzzle.
The photographs, easily handled in their physicality, possess all the flexibility that the visual ensemble offers the viewer. The order in which the works are presented varies constantly, as do the intervals between them. Step by step, the exhibition’s “organizer” influences the rhythm and path of our visit. So, with each new installation, a new path is insinuated, a new story is invented and deconstructed. Let’s see what Denis Lessard has in store for us in April at Tangente, where these photographs by Daniel Dion will once again be on show.