in camera présente « Sirocco » un ensemble d’une vingtaine de photographies en couleur de Dolorès Marat.
Ces photographies ont été réalisées depuis 2005 dans le pourtour méditerranéen: Marseille, Bastia, Tunisie, Syrie, Jordanie, Egypte, Italie. Passionée par ces lieux et ces villes mythiques, Dolorès Marat s’intéresse à l’aspect immuable de ce vieux monde. Ses images provoquent I‘imagination de celui qui regarde. Ainsi nombre de personnages, lieux, objets, fragments, apparemment anodins, ou juste éléments de décoration, sont détournés par l’artiste. Elle les transforme avec talent en photographies magiques et irréelles.
A l’encontre de la réputation de «légèreté» de certaines villes du pourtour méditerranéen, Dolorès Marat donne à voir à travers ses images une certaine «gravité», et semble avoir trouvé le lien invisible et éternel qui fait de la Méditerranée la « Mare Medi Terra ».`
 
« On éprouve chaque fois, en regardant les images de Marat, la sensation d’être en douceur pris au piège. Comme si, s’attachant aux autres, elle dessinait les contours fragiles de nos propres existences. Une tristesse diffuse semble s’être emparée du monde, et de chacun, pour nous laisser sans défense, désemparés, perdus et assiégés de toute part. » Stéphane Guibourge
 
«Dolorès Marat fait preuve d’une remarquable constance dans l’exercice de son art. Dès les premières publications de ses images, elle se signale par une inspiration et une écriture qui ne vont pas varier, ou à peine, à tel point que ses photographies apparaissent un peu aujourd’hui comme hors du temps, sans date... Ce qui retient notre attention, c’est avant tout le caractère impressionniste de la représentation que Dolorès Marat donne de la réalité qui l’entoure : la manière d’aborder les gens, les objets, de fixer l’atmosphère des lieux qu’elle affectionne, la manière de cadrer, de regarder à une certaine distance sans trop détailler. Et cette démarche a dès le début trouvé son aboutissement, sa matérialisation, son rythme, dans un tirage photographique à caractère artisanal: le procédé Fresson. Un tirage immédiatement reconnaissable par son rendu particulier des couleurs, et par une texture du papier très présente.» Gabriel Bauret
 
Dolorès Marat débute la photographie en 1959 dans une boutique de quartier où elle apprend les techniques de laboratoire. De 1969 à 1982, elle est engagée comme photographe attitrée au magazine Votre Beauté où elle développe et tire les photos des plus grands noms du moment : Guy Bourdin, Jeanloup Sieff, Helmut Newton, Sarah Moon....
Depuis 1983, Dolorès Marat développe un travail personnel qu’elle expose régulièrement à Paris, Londres, New York et Bruxelles.
 
Au détriment des modes et des genres, Dolorès Marat continue ses voyages et sa recherche. Son travail d’auteur utilise uniquement le procédé de tirage Fresson.

For her first solo exhibition at galerie kamel mennour, the Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens punctuates the space with works that play with the mobile states of matter, varied nuances of colours and the intensity of light.
 
A long metal I-beam has been placed on the concrete floor of the gallery, of which it appears to form a part. Its mass anchors it securely to the floor, but its upper surface shines with an oily brightness. Metal is by its nature chthonian, but here it gives back something of the sky it reflects, because the artist has made the light jump out by polishing the metal. Responding to the density of the beam is the transparency of two volumes of glass, also placed on the ground. Coloured throughout, these parallelepipeds were created in the Czech Republic. They capture a light that gives the impression of radiating out from within the works. Close by, a cubic glass aquarium plays similarly with the light, but also with the space around it. Like a black hole, it swallows everything, only to give it all back in a diffracted, quasi-cubist and kaleidoscopic way. It is filled with liquid, on the surface of which an intense monochrome tonality gives the impression of a phantom image. These games of reflections are like thresholds where images dissolve.
Finally, the last work is the continuation of a series begun in 1997 with the white fog at the M HKA in Antwerp, a fog which became coloured in 2000 in Tours, and likewise the following year at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin with the installation Blue, Red and Yellow. Here, with the walls painted in hot colours, the natural light and artificial fog induce the troubling experience of evolving in a paradoxical space, at once dense and light, enclosed and infinite. There is also a bewitching sensation of heaviness, and the impression of being immersed in colour, of a journey into an intangible abstraction.
 
Born in Folkestone (UK) in 1956, Ann Veronica lives and works in Brussels (BE).
Her work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions: “Serendipity”, WIELS - Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (BE), “Are you experienced?”, Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló (ES), Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Kunstverein München (GE), Musée d’Orsay, Paris (FR), CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (USA), Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (UK), Kunsthalle Bern (CH) and Mac Marseille (FR)…
Since 1985, she has also participated in major group exhibitions, including at: Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoCA - Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles (USA), Power Plant - Contemporary Art Gallery (Canada), Generalli Foundation (AT), Chisenhale Gallery, Hayward Gallery (UK), Witte de With, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Kröller-Müller Museum (NL), Kunstverein (GE); and taken part in various international biennales: the Biennale of Sydney (AUS), as well as those of Istanbul (TR), São Paulo (BR) and Seoul (KR). Alongside Michel François, she represented Belgium at the 1999 Venice Biennale (IT).
Ann Veronica Janssens collaborates regularly with choreographers (Pierre Droulers and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker).
In 2009, with Nathalie Ergino, she initiated the ‘Laboratoire espace cerveau’ at the IAC in Villeurbanne (FR).
Her work is currently on show at the Grand Palais in the exhibition « Dynamo, Un siècle de lumière et de mouvement dans l'art, 1913 – 2013 ». Ann Veronica Janssens is the author of a commissioned work for the chapelle Saint-Vincent of Grignan, inauguration on May 25th.

Cyrille André was at first known for the sculptures he made carving tree trunks with the chain saw. Often inspired by the social behavior, he uses the animal or monumental metaphor to treat these subjects. After the outdoor exhibition which the City of Metz dedicated him during summer 2012 at the Botanical garden, the Convent of Récollets and the Arsenal, for his fourth personal exhibition at Galerie Pièce Unique, Cyrille André stages a set of hybrid figures consisted of human bodies decorated with animal heads. These sculptures, of various sizes in polyester resin, bronze or aluminum, have a dialogue between them and invite us to do so.
 
By associating the animal representation with the human figure Cyrille André enriches it with myths, faiths and symbols which are linked to animals through the collective and individual imaginary. We find on all the continents and in most of the cultures rites which refer to this
“anthropozoomorphist ” hybridization. Since the IV millennium, Egyptians represented their divinities by associating animal parts with the human body. This practice allowed to move men closer to gods and to overtake the human condition.
 
The same thing happens in Africa where the bearing of zoomorphic masks is still of current events in numerous ritual ceremonies. These masks are the representation of the dominant characteristics of the represented animals and they mostly allow to communicate with the spirits.
Here, it is not about mask. These animal heads are a part of these human bodies. The whole figures are inhabited by their bestiality.

Exhibition Ron Mueck
Ron Mueck has been invited to present his new sculpture at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain from 16 April to 29 September 2013. This is his first major exhibition in Europe since the hugely successful Fondation Cartier exhibition of 2005.
 
In addition to six important recent sculptures the show includes three produced especially for this event. A new film recording their creation has been made for the occasion by Gautier Deblonde. Revealing the reclusive artist at work further emphasizes the sensitivity and power of Ron Mueck’s sculpture and highlights its particular resonance for our time.
 
A Ron Mueck exhibition is a rare event.
Based in London, Ron Mueck has had highly acclaimed exhibitions around the world from Japan to Australia, New Zealand and Mexico, but shows of his new work in Europe have not been frequent occurrences. Mueck works slowly in his small North London studio, making time itself an important element in his creative process. His human figures are meticulously detailed, with surprising changes of scale that place them as far from academic realism as they are from pop art or hyperrealism.

This year, as part of its contemporary art programme, the Musée Rodin invites the artist Erik Samakh to occupy and exhibit his works in the museum garden. Between nature and sculpture, materiality and impalpability, Erik Samakh designs a one-of-a-kind outdoor exhibition in the Musée Rodin garden.
Opens to the public on the Night of Museums, Saturday 18 May, from 7 PM to midnight.
 
Erik Samakh describes himself as a “hunter-gatherer” of images and sounds, which he has captured, recorded and exhibited for over 25 years in natural settings. His work is nurtured by a constant dialogue with nature, via an approach that combines a certain archaic relationship with the living world, and extremely sophisticated technical devices and systems. The artist ever seeks to trigger actions and reactions on the part of men and landscapes, to awaken the senses, and to perturb or shift our perception of place.
 
Taking advantage of the spirit and atmosphere unique to the Musée Rodin, particularly its garden, Erik Samakh creates two large, one-of-a-kind installations, in response both to the garden’s urban, domesticated and yet eminently poetic nature and to Rodin’s sculptures.
 
“Voices, yew trees”, is a sound installation presented around the main courtyard. This installation pursues the artist‘s constant theme of sound and its capacity to create meaning all by itself. However, the encounter with Rodin’s oeuvre induces a slight shift of focus: used to “chasing” sounds made by animals and their movements, Samakh here turns his attention to humans and the human voice. Calling upon the female voices of the Musée Rodin, the artist uses the women’s breathing, laughter, smiles and whispers to create a spatialized, sound-based creation occupying and moving about among the yew trees surrounding The Thinker and The Three Shades, thereby evoking female presences. While jolting our habitual perception of the site, Erik Samakh also uses these ghost-like voices to respond in his own manner to the materiality of Rodin’s sculptures and his relationship with figures and models.
 
The second installation, “Firefly Stones” , departs from the main courtyard and continues on where the first installation left off. Ten blocks of natural stone are scattered about the garden, all spangled with the artist‘s famous “fireflies”: left untouched or covered with moss, resembling so many rough sculptures seemingly fallen from the sky or risen up from the ground, miniature gardens during the day and luminous stones at night. The artist’s signature “fireflies” light up the garden and its sculptures, in shady corners and at nightfall. Designed specifically for the Musée Rodin, these strange stones pursue Samakh’s stone theme, as illustrated by such works as his “Sound Stone”, “Lizard Stone”, “Lizard balanced on a stone” , etc. They underline the garden’s tranquillity and poetry, while at the same time disturbing our habitual perception of the site and adding complexity to the relationship between sculpture and nature: a connection is drawn between Rodin’s bronzes and the stones' patina-like moss, between the garden as a whole and these miniature gardens, between the raw Portuguese stone and Rodin’s blocks of non finito marble, while the colour and brutality of granite is contrasted with the refinement of the bronze casts or the ethereal whiteness of the marble.
 
Born in 1959 in Saint-Georges de Didonne, the artist and national art schools professor Erik Samakh has exhibited his work in France and around the world: the Quai Branly Museum, the Maubuisson Abbey, the International Center of Art and Landscape at Vassivière Island, the Château de Chaumont sur Loire, the Santiago de Chile Contemporary Art Museum, the Tijuca Forest in Rio de Janeiro, etc.