Two visions, two sensibilities, one wonder
For its second participation in Arles, the Echo 119 gallery celebrates light as a universal language and living material, bringing together two artists with distinct but complementary sensibilities.
Visible in a 12th century chapel behind the arenas, the Sacrées Lumières exhibition establishes a poetic and sensitive dialogue between Rinko Kawauchi andLaure Winants .
Kawauchi , a major figure in Japanese photography, captures the grace of everyday life with a rare delicacy. Whereas his M/E series evokes his intimate rebirth in the bowels of a volcano, his latest series presents flowers enhanced with watercolors—true prayers for peace in the face of current conflicts.
An iconic artist on the Japanese photography scene, Rinko Kawauchi has been developing a body of work of great delicacy for over two decades. Her gaze, imbued with spirituality and introspection, transforms the ordinary into apparition. In M/E —whose two letters (an acronym for "Mother Earth") also form the word "me"—it begins with a (re)birth: as a woman, as an artist too, after an experience in the bowels of a volcano visited in Iceland in 2019, experienced as a return to a mother's womb. Lava and ash here become metaphors for rebirth. In mirror imagery, her latest series presents flowers enhanced with hand-painted watercolors, fragile and luminous images, conceived as silent prayers in the face of the tensions of the contemporary world.
Opposite her, the Belgian artist Laure Winants continues his work around ice as an optical tool where light as a natural phenomenon and memory trace captures the memory of matter. In Time Capsule , created in the heart of the Arctic, she captures polar light passing through the ice strata, using in situ photosensitive processes. The image is no longer simply taken, it is co-produced with the elements. This alchemical process reveals the imprint of time, where the ice becomes at once support, subject and witness. Prism, passage, presence: each work presents itself as a fragment of a changing landscape, a frozen moment of a world in transformation.
Thus, Sacrées Lumières brings together two contemplative approaches which, each in their own way, restore to light its symbolic, poetic and political power.
Untitled from the series M/E, 2022 ©Rinko Kawauchi
Little Refraction #3, variation 2, 2024 ©Laure Winants