No End in Sight: Guillaume Zuili

In sight of his upcoming exhibition, dive into Guillaume Zuili's recent works through his last two American series: Joshua Tree and American Redux.

From the Californian desert to the urbanized spaces of Los Angeles, Zuili captures a portrait of the American West. The immensity of the geometric reliefs of Joshua Tree is faced with the balance of modernist architectures. These compositions, marked by an aesthetic both minimal and expressionist of the avant-gardes, bind the artist's work with modernist photography, between pictorialism and straight photography. Then, in the manner of a 1950s polar, narrative clues allow the reconstitution of the scenario. Between mystery and verisimilitude, the artists draws a particular atmosphere, an America appearing from ambiguous times, palpable as it seems absent.

This graphic aesthetic, almost brutalist, emanating from Zuili's photographs, are the result of a specific darkroom technique: lith. Providing extraordinarily profound blacks, lith printing allows the artist to unveil the structural essence of his compositions. Allowing space for randomness, this process highlights the materiality of photography, its grain, its raggedness and asperities. Stemming from an embodied savoir-faire, these prints remind us that all photography springs from gesture. Much like the sculptor shaping his work, Guillaume Zuili shapes his images through darkroom techniques. Weaving multiple timeframes into one, he dresses a symbolic image of fabled, vestigial America.