黑料不打烊

Les Douches la Galerie is pleased to present L鈥櫭﹍oge de la main [In Praise of the Hand], a collective exhibition crossing various movements that investigates the motif of the hand in photography. This exhibition brings together fifty prints from the works of twenty-eight artists spanning the period from 1925 to 2018. The hand, a dreaded style exercise in painting and drawing, became a recurring technical and symbolic motif from photography鈥檚 earliest stages onward. Since a shot makes it possible to represent the hand as a fragment, isolated from the rest of the body, the hand henceforth became a subject in its own right. 

It is the ultimate personification of an appendage, signing and affixing its digital imprint. On its own, it metonymically shapes its owner鈥檚 portrait. In fact, Beatrice Abbott chose to represent Jean Cocteau, who was so fascinated by hands that he made them speak in his film The Blood of a Poet (1930), through his two hands harmoniously resting on a hat. In Ernst Haas鈥� portrait of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, the hand also stands for the subject鈥檚 profession and talent, and we search it for signs of his virtuosity. Accompanied by its sculpted double, this emblematic hand underlines his creative force. Often presented in still lifes or joined to industrial objects, hands also express an artistic subjectivity allied or opposed to mechanical production. Jean-Philippe Charbonnier鈥檚 hands, for example, are fused to a typewriter, thus becoming its machinery, while Denise Bellon鈥檚 tiny intertwined hands sow doubt through their artificiality. 

At the opposite end of the spectrum, dematerialised, ghostly hands are a favoured motif of experimental photography. Cut off from reality, translucid, the hands of Andr茅 Steiner, Roger Catherineau, Maurice Tabard and more recently Thierry Balanger present a familiar subject in an unknown, almost phantasmagorical version. In Soluble Fish (1934), Andr茅 Breton was already able to write, 鈥業 took this hand in mine; raising it to my lips, I suddenly noticed that it was transparent and that through it one could see the great garden where the most experienced divine creatures go to live鈥�.