beaux livres : photo, architecture, art

During a months-long artist residency in Mexico, Yves Trémorin set out to capture the essence of the country from a cultural, historical, and mythological perspective. Using his artistic skills, he returned from his Mexican journey with a fascinating collection of images, much like an ethnologist of a rather unique kind. His practice of capturing objects or portraits through photography, essentially building a collection to serve his chosen research, takes on its full meaning here. Isolating his subjects, often against a black background, as is his custom, he plays on the image of the Western explorer venturing into a distant land, bringing back, through his wanderings, objects and images that become like museum relics, essential for understanding a civilization with codes different from our own. The effect is all the more powerful because, in light of these photographs, a true portrait of Mexico emerges. This portrait is formed through the specificity of its inhabitants’ bodies and the representations of symbolic figures found in images of animals or objects, which are then transposed into the realm of contemporary art. Nudes or portraits with unusual gestures seem to refer solely to the domain of performance art, while in fact they employ a sign language explicitly linked to representations buried in collective mythology. A breathtaking photograph of a black dog might refer to the figure of Ahuitzotl, a tattooed back to Quetzalcoatl—the famous feathered serpent—a toad photographed head-on at the back of a cave to the goddess Tlaltecuhtli, a stylized rabbit on an object of deliberate kitsch to the day of the rabbit Tochtli and her protector Mayahuel, goddess of the agave and fertility. Yves Trémorin’s Mexican images avoid any photographic effect in order to focus on (and concentrate) the subject.

What is shown is never insignificant, never accidental: several layers of interpretation are to be discovered behind the apparent simplicity of the images, which might, at first glance, be considered a factual catalog of people, animals, or more or less exotic objects. Beyond references to a culture with ancient mythologies, to a people’s particular relationship with death, and to wordplay, Trémorin’s Mexican work does not forget that this country has been home to great artists. And through these images, we also find other mythologies, more photographic in nature, such as the masterpieces created by Edward Weston or Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

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