Anne Garde: photographer of twilight

With time, the reasons to love Anne Garde's photographic work are growing in number and strength. Thank you to Connaissance des Arts for reminding us of this. Or one would risk taking her for a ninth colourful Warhol emulator.

Among her many photographs exploring sometimes very different plastic paths, art history should remember Anne Garde's colourful images produced at the end of the 2000s. Even more so than the aesthetic sublimation of India that revealed her to the public. In both cases, the artistic work waits for the stage to be set before starting.

For Garde's field of excellence is above all architectural photography, to which she was introduced very early in her career as an artist. But an architectural photo reviewed and corrected by the magic of the lights and colours that she learned to mix in the context of a job as a lighting engineer that financed her studies.

Let's recap. A place, lights, colours. The place is immovable, irremovable. The colours and lights are ephemeral. It is a dance and then the night like the butterflies.  While places die slowly and age like us. And like our civilizations in the East as well as in the West on the decline.

Architectural photography has a mission to show that a place is beautiful as it is. It is an advertisement for architecture, an architect's personal branding. Anne Garde's aim is the opposite. She could use light to magnify places in decay, as we have seen so many times, with a desire to sublimate what would not normally appear to be aesthetic. This photo in fact de-realizes reality in the very movement by which it aestheticizes it.

Anne Garde also likes to shoot decayed places, symbols of our world whose modernity belongs to the past. But she makes up her stone and concrete "mannequins" so that they are the most beautiful in front of the lens.

This is where the pigments that make up her trademark, the Garde signature, come into play. This is the anti-photoshop. The visual special effects are not worked on after the shooting or even afterwards. Everything is done live. With zero filters. And that's what's great. Unique. Connaissance des Arts points out this difference, this distinction, underlining that the artist simply sprays his coloured powders, sometimes with a sulphate gun, dabs certain surfaces with a sponge or sends coloured smoke to metamorphose spaces.

The real is thus tinted by the magic of colour and light into another magnified reality of which it is only the shadow. It is this imperceptible beauty for those who do not know how to dream it that Anne Garde reveals to us. Her "in-between sensibility", as Elisabeth Védrenne nicely puts it in Connaissances, leads her to prefer deserted or decadent places. These photos of places captured at the tipping point produce an "augmented reality" that lasts only as long as a click.

The film of our twilight summarised in a few snapshots. And the worst thing is that this frozen documentary on our future fascinates us by its beauty.

Illustration: Anne Garde - Extralight 1 2008 + Anne Garde - Extralight 4 - 2008