Picasso is a lot of Picasso. The name is, in itself, a canvas supported by mystery. What landscapes do his wits inhabit? Is his art uninhabitable by him? And if he dwells, does he have a place?
Attend the Bernard Plossu exhibition. Picasso's Catalan Landscapes, in which the photographer Bernard Plossu – Grand Prix National de la Photographie in 1988 – wanted to capture in his photographs a journey through the landscapes that inspired the artist during his time in Catalonia, represents an approach to that not the place where Picasso's art lives. Finding it means embarking on a journey, regardless of representation, in search of invocation. Plossu is a pilgrim with complicity in that journey.
The painter of Gernika loved Barcelona, the city where he has his museum and from which the French photographer's exhibition starts. In addition to the Barcelona of flowery cobblestones, Plossu travels to Gósol, Horta de Sant Joan or Cadaqués, to develop a display, like an emotional radiograph, of visions in search of the secret noise with a high Picassian charge.
Plossu brings together a series of photographs, printed on Fresson paper, one of the photographer's personal hallmarks since 1960. Special texture, accumulation of layers of pigment with different light sensitivity without the need for another support: essential ingredients of the pocket odyssey proposed by the photographer.
Wanting to get away from the grandiloquence of the landscape, the collection of photographs seeks to delve into the poetics of the gaze, in the invocation of the painting and the connection with the young Picasso who, faced with those landscapes, such as those of Horta de Sant Joan, discovered bucolic life. . Exploration aims to abandon the boundaries of time in favor of a capture: the spirit of the place.
Between 2019 and 2021, Bernard Plossu toured, camera in hand, the Catalan places where a young Pablo Picasso stayed. All the towns, their mountains, their coasts, their alleys, their terraces and even their ventilation ducts are still, in some way, inhabited by the spirit of the Malaga painter. A symptom of immortality that Plossu tries to capture with his sensitivity reflected in 60 photographs related to 20 works by Picasso.
The tour begins in Barcelona, the scene of small prints made by Picasso from 1895 to 1897 during his training period. The metropolis is left to reach Horta de Sant Joan, a place where, away from academic life, Picasso frees his lines and gaze. In Gósol he produced more than 300 works, faithful portraits of the town and its inhabitants, where he got rid of the idealized vision in favor of formal and plastic concerns.
Cadaqués, land of artists par excellence, where the man from Malaga radicalized his abstraction and considerably increased his work, marks the end of Plossu's exercise, an attempt to inhabit the uninhabitable: Pi-ca-sso.
