Visual Art

Official Selection / World Premiere – Musée McCord Stewart – Saturday, March 18, 2023, 1 p.m. via The International Festival of Films on Art (Le FIFA).

WATER 1 explores the connection between matter, reality, life, and the absurdity of human thought. Kandalaft uses sound to deceive our senses and inject confusion. Through image he highlights the beauty and complexity of natural elements and their patterns in a style reminiscent of pictorialist photography, where evocative beauty takes precedence over faithful representation of reality.

‍

Elora Weill-Engerer
Art Critic
Member of AICA

Urban spaces shaped by man and yet entirely unpopulated, by the crudity of their subject matter Marc Kandalaft’s images evoke the approach of Germany’s New Objectivity movement, which often turned its lens on uninhabited industrial spaces. Here the document subsumes the image and the scientific method seeps into the creative process to prioritize, classify, prescribe. Generic topoi, scraps of iron, brick, or clouds of vapor — apparitions that emerge only in the expressive collection of the photographer-wanderer, punctuating the real in a suspension of judgment.

As for capturing wonder, it all depends on the instant. Chance, here, is the first correlate of the image; an image not so much sought out as received by the artist. An alternative thus presents itself to the purely subjective approach, in the sense of the auto-biographical. The systemic dimension of the series married with the simplicity of its composition are far more reminiscent of the principles of the documentary style, as theorized by Olivier Lugon^[1]. At the same time, this signals the capacity of art-documentary acolytes to employ qualities specific to the medium in the interest of a technical originality that nonetheless takes raw material as its theme. This topographic air does nothing to detract from the poetics of the ensemble. On the contrary: the everyday is photogenic, demonstrated by the enigmatic character of these urban motifs, as evocative of almost-cinematic narratives as they are devoid of detail in themselves. Better yet, the play on light and shadow, the grain obtained from a singular process, the tendency to abstraction lend these works a neo-pictorialist accent when we step back to take in the combined effects of the aesthetic’s interference in the real. This only becomes more pronounced in light of the textural aspect of the medium and the atmosphere thus conjured.‍

Marc Kandalaft’s 33 33 33 conjugates photographic processes that tend to oppose each other: the image is taken on film, before being projected digitally, then partially captured on digital camera as a sample and then re-used in video. The pictorial aspect of the work is therefore never the result of any real intervention in the photograph itself, the given effects produced only by the different prisms that modulate the images. 

‍

Rather than a “pure” objectivity, here objectivity is a process anterior to the capture of the image insofar as it allows for the photographic experience. It is within this delimited system that the artist’s freedom is expressed. The alliance of different grains, sharp and then blurred, the palimpsest double-exposures, cover scenes with an isolating veil. The visual archeology that results offers a host of textures that are to be deciphered like a language. If the stage is bare, humanity subsists in the form of traces, imperceptible marks, as in the quiet emptiness that follows the execution of a perfect crime.

"Land of Chaos and Saints" is a 2017 collection of photographs shot in Lebanon. This series effectively captures the country's complex duality, showcasing both its chaotic, violent side and its mystical side in a poetic and mundane manner. The misty images were captured in Annaya, Saint Charbel's hometown. They add a unique perspective, making it a great reflection of Lebanon's identity.