L’INSTANT D’APRÈS

CHRISTIAN MAILLARD
photographs
November 13 – December 4, 2021

Christian Maillard is not a solitary walker. Curious about everything, he walks the space, the eye and the mind on alert. For him, the journey is anchored in the near and far, on the other side of the world like in the streets of Paris. There is no question of traveling through territories to distract from big or small worries, nor to pass the time to pass it. It’s about being awake, welcoming visual encounters, to know how to recognize them or to provoke them over the walks and strolls.

He is the author of what happens in his images and his traveling companions, they, maybe haven’t noticed it. Like a diaphragm that opens or closes to allow the magic of a moment to fix himself, his benevolent gaze chooses, aims, decides. Because there is a lot of goodwill in his outlook on the world, and great culture, which he refines according to his discoveries. This is why his photographs in turn offer us the possibility of understanding the other, to respect everyday life and to appreciate all its peculiarities.

To make his photographs speak, he decides at times to operate a fixed point on an object that evokes those who have remained out of focus or, by others, to capture an attitude, a metonymic figure of multiple faces of the human. There are also in his work these images which one could say that they are “natural”, because without any intervention other than that of the moment of capture. The precision of a rigorous and skillful framing provokes the meeting of different plans, which express the diversity and the richness of his gaze.

Françoise Paviot