Mennour is pleased to present Marie Bovo’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery. 

Just before nightfall, in locations carefully chosen after having walked through them in the day time, Marie Bovo installs her photographic chambers in the forest, at the place she feels the moonlight will shed its light. Between Nice and Marseille, on the shores of the Mediterranean, where light pollution will not negate the night, she lets images that potentially carry the dreams of the forests form slowly, very slowly, on the surface of the film plate. For this new exhibition at Mennour, the photographer brings forward the figure of the artist as a faun: she doesn’t act as an external eye, but blends in with the forests welcoming her.

 In the distance, the horizon draws an imaginary line, never entirely swallowed by a darkness that spreads as the sun disappears behind the sea—later, and gradually later at the height of summer, quickly and very quickly when autumn turns into winter. To reach those places that she only leaves at dawn, from the Massifs de l’Esterel in spring to the Massifs des Maures and Massif du Tanneron in November, the photographer often walked for several hours on the paths of the garrigue, among brambles and juniper bushes, loaded with photo equipment whose blind eye will take in what she will not be able to see entirely. The chosen sites, sheltered from human presence for the duration of the night, herald the promise of an active animal, vegetable and mineral life. Places imbued with a differentiated energy that Marie Bovo came across as she randomly explored; places without any specific points of view, where trees are the tapestry threads that at times guide the eyes, at times cloud them, block them.

In spite of the bad weather, rain sometimes, everything has to be ready for taking photographs, the weather has to suspend its allegiance to daylight, to the usual unfolding of things, in order to let the exposure settle in the flowing of seconds, minutes and hours intuitively timed following the trajectory of the Moon. Though the darkness gives the impression of shrouding everything, the silence is never complete. Here and there, invisible, all kinds of creatures rustle, from the tiniest to the most astonishing. In the heart of the night, a breeze of wind suddenly rustles the tops of the canopy, appearing like a ghost presence in the silence. Those forests, those maquis breathe as wounded territories continually threatened by the fire.

Hidden away in the middle of the woods, half-awake, half-asleep, the artist dreams. She will dream each night of a full Moon dreaded so much in the collective imaginary when, in reality, the power of its sparkling light becomes a magnet in the darkness. It is truly the strangeness of this light, emanating from the sole visible side of the Moon, that will enable the silver greys of the olive trees, the undefinable blues of the maritime pines, the ochres, the violets of the cork oak trees, hues of a landscape forever shifting, to be imprinted on the unique negative on which they will set, as the stars continue their revolution and the night moves towards the day.

To each phase chosen in the moon calendar that has become her work breviary, Marie Bovo knows she will discover, a posteriori only, what she had come to seek—the image of a presence as much as that of a space.

The multiplicity of trees and woodland entities at work in “Les forêts d’Hypnos” questions the notion of composition in today’s art: could it be its metaphor? The relations of exchange and mutual aid that the forest create, the diversified compositions it embodies to keep alive, collectively, the subjects, conceal a network of forces in which one will continually find matter to reorientate oneself towards an open future.

— Marcelline Delbecq 

Translated by Paul Buck