COULEUR 1970s

CHRISTIAN MAILLARD
photographs
December 9, 2022 – February 4, 2023

After exploring several facets of Christian Maillard’s photographic work with his first exhibition at the Galerie du Lendemain, “L’instant d’après”, presented in November 2021, a series of black and white photographs resulting from travels and encounters around the world, in the vein of humanist and social realism, close to American “street photography”, as well as a series entitled “Couleurs abstraites”, a selection of unpublished shots in color, shapes and materials in macro plan, a precious organic and colorful exploration, the Galerie du Lendemain offers for its second exhibition with Christian Maillard an original and exclusive selection of Kodakrome color slides, selected in the 1970s.

The photographer’s favorite themes are travel, the taste for discovery, the confrontation with foreign cultures. They are perfectly embodied here through these portraits who seem to come from such a distant past – these photographs are however hardly more than 50 years old -, from a world so far removed from our contemporary societies, where everything that was manual, physical and artisanal has disappeared with the advent of digital and virtual.

In these photographs where the colors burst with life in intense chromatic contrasts, composing real “classic” paintings, we feel the importance of the traditions of each region visited, of each country explored. Sometimes centuries-old traditions, with these women and men who tirelessly repeated these gestures with precision to create, magnify or more simply nourish their loved ones.

It is a precious testimony, tinged with a touch of humor in the composition of certain images, the representation of a vanished era, certain countries have changed their name and appearance, following political upheavals, civil wars, climatic disasters, some cities have been deserted, others have been destroyed, the photographer’s time and talent, his revealing eye, have kept the essential memory of these smiles, these gestures, these attitudes of this decade of the 70s. An ultra-contrasted, contradictory and terribly complex decade which, just after the “1968 revolution”, had turned its back on old ideologies and dreamed of shared freedoms in a world without borders…