Eikoh Hosoe, Gaudì
through 14 mars 2020, baudoin lebon gallery, Paris
www.baudoin-lebon.com
Hosoe’s first contact with Gaudi’s architecture occurs in 1964 thanks to the desire of a Barcelonan editor to publish a Spanish version of his book Ba Ra Kei-Ordeal by Roses. Yet, it is only 13 years later, in 1977 that he begins to photograph the Park Güell and the Sagrada Familia. He does not however seize at that moment the spirit or the ideology of the creator of these architectures, nor in 1978 during his 3rd shooting, and it is probably for that reason that his work continues until 1984. Hosoe has never photographed Japanese architecture. He prefers humans as models but with Gaudi, architecture resembles for him bodies with strong sexual potential.
The architectural photographs of Gaudi in Barcelona of which Hosoe feels the zen spirit, found in his book The Cosmos of Gaudi and presented for the first time in France with baudoin lebon gallery, does not move away from this search because his oriented and engaged perspectives resemble the curves of the human body whose depth in chiaroscuro recalls a spectacle of sound and light.
“For me photography can be both a recording and a 'mirror' or a ‘Window’ of self-expression. The camera is generally assumed to be unable to describe what is invisible to the eye and yet the photographer who handles it well arrives to represent what remains hidden in his memory. —Eikoh Hosoe”.