Weddings

This series, known as "Weddings", is doubly unique and singular in Etienne Renzo's career, with photographs that are both abstract and semi-accidental. It is the antithesis of posed images processed in a laboratory. Here, the photography is the result of a process linked to the deterioration of Ektachrome silver-based slides of wedding ceremonies taken in the 1970s and 1980s. These are strange images, both resurrected and produced by chance through an astonishing alchemy of shapes and colours.

Forgotten and never-before-seen images
Forgotten in their original boxes for many years, the slides underwent a dual process of slow decomposition and dendritic crystallisation of their dyes. The resulting images are the product of the chaotic fusion of the chromogenic layers. They also capture the temporality of the process, which may have taken place over several years. These never-before-seen images will be presented in light boxes that reveal all their substance and chromatic subtleties. Like phantasmagorical stained-glass windows that owe as much to chance as to the chemistry of matter, colour and light. These images bring into play the phenomenon of pareidolia (the illusion of recognising familiar images), reminiscent of cosmic snapshots, aerial views of the Earth, or photographs of cells taken with an electron microscope.

Images with an alchemical dimension
From an aesthetic and historical point of view, these images, partly due to chance, refer us as much to the informal abstract painting of the 1950s and 1960s, linked to the multiple anti-painting and anti-art movements, as to immemorial processes of creativity. These include those derived from alchemical traditions, whose philosophy was to regenerate nature through culture. And vice versa. They thus proceed from an anti-photography, disrupting the codes and uses of the image. Let us not forget that the metaphysics of marriage is at the heart of the alchemical process, through the hierogamy of the moon and the sun. Or the fusion of opposites, which allows the 'artist', who is none other than the alchemist, to access the androgynous principle known as the 'rebis', the final stage before reaching the 'great work' of creating the philosopher's stone. A stone synonymous with a panacea that cures all ills by giving access to a form of immortality.

A ghost photograph
By deciding to exhume and resurrect these images for exhibition, Etienne Renzo invents (in the sense of discovering a buried archaeological treasure) a form, a paradoxical photograph that is both totally conceptual and material. And in a way, natural. A form of raw, organic, transhistorical and alchemical photography that combines the principles of the human and the non-human. Doesn't the artist himself speak of "transmutation"? The height of photographic chemistry, when these images invent their own laboratory by befriending the invisible. For these images clearly have to do with ghosts and cultures of the invisible. Especially when they reveal silhouettes of presences that may be thought of as entities. They also have something of automatic writing, the Rorschach test, or reading coffee grounds, connecting the depths of the unconscious and those of nature. It is as if they sublimate and fix, in a paradoxical zoom effect, the unknown space that we presume to exist between the multiple dimensions of reality. From micro to macro, between the visible and the invisible.

Hypnotic images that heal
However, when left to contemplate, these images have a rather soothing energy. That is to say, they can evoke feelings of calm, serenity, and even pleasure. Not unlike the hypnotic effect of watching goldfish in an aquarium or a kaleidoscope of colours and lights. Not far from what one might feel when faced with the magic of stained glass or certain paintings. This is why these images are both useful and precious. They are true works of art that transcend the status and object and even the subject of photography. Unless they fully embody it in an aesthetic of sublimation, transcendence and resilience. For these images are healing. First of all, they heal the divide between the feminine and the masculine. And more broadly, between the natural and the cultural. This is part of our contemporary drama. This is probably why they are destined to become active symbols, even icons, of the era that resurrected them. Like sleeping beauties awakened to reactivate a form of photographic panacea.

The exhibition project
The exhibition project consists first of all in continuing the work of exhuming the slides from their boxes. The next step is to select them and make prints for light boxes. The exhibition will bring together between 20 and 30 prints. A new series of slide re-decompositions has recently been initiated from the archives of Etienne Renzo.