The photographs of
Dogma
are head-on. No objectivity
accompanies their apparent neutrality, however - nothing but the
lonely truth Aurélien Villette has captured. Thus begins a most intimate
search amongst the process of reappropriation of images detached
from reality.
The work of textures, photo editing and digital enhancement draws and
extracts from the darkroom that which has been buried, killed and spurned.
Where then is the frontier between the real and the created? The art
of Aurélien Villette lies precisely in never stepping over the line, but in
walking it like a tightrope, ensuring that the reader asks the questions.
It is after all in our own hands where lies the ability to construct,
deconstruct and reconstruct our own reality through extracted,
examined, and manipulated scraps of facts.Truths are never singular,
and together they work in a never-ending dialectic to construct,
deconstruct and reconstruct. Sisyphus is no more than our very selves.
Dogma invites reflexion and questions, rather than answers, and
draws us through past and present towards a time to come.
Dogma
aspires to reveal truths constructed and deconstructed: beliefs, religions,
political or economic dictates.
Dogma
stalks these truths everywhere that
humans, believing ourselves untouched by time, running from death and
annihilation, seeking to conquer our own ephemeral existence on earth, have
imprinted the latter with polychromatic portraits, and modelled it into memorials.
Churches reconverted to dormitories, congress halls void of crowds and
their leaders, barracks invaded by lth. These buildings draw their
boundaries still. Inside their walls, on their cymas or under their roofs,
layers of dogmas and doxas are superimposed. Time appears to have
stopped and set here the True, the Certain and the Real of yesterday.
Other beliefs and certainties have replaced them today; they too will be
swept away in time.
The interiors of old are now exposed to the elements. The frontiers
between nature and civilisation, inside and outside, past and
present, blur. Melancholy images, but not only. The vulnerability of
these architectural beauties leaves one speechless. Grandiose and
fragile both.
