Catalogue MATTER & LIGHT – Gérald Portenart
Through a practice of photographic sculpture, Gérald Portenart explores the conditions under which the image appears.
The exhibition does not seek to show, but to shift the gaze. It invites us to slow down, to enter a zone of perception where bearings are found and where the image becomes a sensory experience.
In this space, the visible becomes fragile in favour of feeling. The works act as thresholds: they open passages between presence and disappearance, between perception and projection.
The stake is simple: to restore to the image a capacity for experience. To ensure that it is no longer merely looked at, but traversed.
My work is grounded in a simple attempt: to shift the experience of the image.
I do not seek to produce a photograph as a readable or descriptive surface, but to construct perceptual situations. Images that do not give themselves immediately, that require a time of adjustment, a form of availability of the gaze.
Fascinated by clouds, I use light, blur, mist and diffraction phenomena as active materials. These elements do not alter the image: they are its condition. They introduce an instability, a disturbance that prevents fiction and opens a more sensory space.
What interests me lies in this in-between: where the image appears without stabilising, where it eludes us while remaining present.
Catalogue MATTER & LIGHT – Gérald Portenart
My practice is part of the continuity of a work of gesture. Before photography, I worked as a head hairdresser in the 7th Art for 35 years, an activity I always considered as a form of sculpture. Working with material, volume, light, creating worlds and characters, entering into relation with a presence: this experience profoundly shaped my relationship to creation.
It made me want to go behind the camera and make short films and message-driven music videos:
“Hell Lies to Me” (2014)
“On My Way” by Sbu Manaï (2020)
“13 Attentions” Nikon Film Festival (2023)
“Letting Go” Hello Planète Festival (2024)
“The Beginning of the End” Nikon Film Festival (2025)
Today I pursue this research through what I call photographic sculpture. It is no longer a matter of modelling a form, but of working on the conditions of its appearance.
In a context of visual saturation, I am interested in images that resist the obvious. Images that do not seek to capture attention, but to slow perception, to create a form of listening.
What I propose is not a reading, but an experience: a passage.
A passage in which the gaze slips, hesitates, sometimes gets lost, and in which, within this instability, something can happen.
Gérald Portenart