Consonances

2 February - 1 April 2017

Overview

"Throughout his wanderings, Boyer photographs urban fragments free of any human figure, taking an approach to reality devoid of any documentary purpose. Walls, floors, abandoned elements: it is not the subject nor the meaning projected by Adrien Boyer that prevails in his photographs, but the correspondence between the lines, the forms and the colors, which catch our eyes like a raw force. Driven by the will to restore "the first emotion associated with pure aesthetics, free of any intention or interpretation" that he feels in front of the fragile balance of an ordering of forms, he manages to extract the beauty with a great sense of framing and composition. He thus sculpts in the depths of the world photographs with a minimalist aesthetic, in which materials and elements draw large colored planes with strong pictorial references. Nicolas de Staël, Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko are among the masters of Adrien Boyer, whose photographs, neither staged nor retouched, show a real power of abstraction."

Diane Dufour, artistic consultant of the 2016 HSBC Prize for Photography and director of the BAL.