The solo exhibition that the CRP/ is dedicating to artist Jean Luc Tartarin offers visitors the chance to plunge into the richness of images through a selection of photographs from the series Entre(s) 2013 and Arbres 1983-1989. Although the exhibition Le génie des arbres, extraits 1983-2013 juxtaposes different series by this artist who has been developing a demanding body of photographic work since the 1970s, it is not in the spirit of a retrospective: the overview of works it offers makes it possible to unravel and understand a unique creative process involving constant research that delves into image material, into photographic emulsion. Photography shares with painting the aim of revealing and reinventing reality, and it has been carrying on a dialogue with this other medium ever since its beginnings.
This time, his experimentation medium is the motif of the landscape and forest. For over thirty years, the artist has been wandering the forests of Moselle to penetrate the mystery of images. This is done through meticulous work on prints, revealing the image on paper in all its potential as material and light, or through digital work on a computer file; the artist’s technique and his very precise knowledge of the medium withdraw to the background, placing themselves in the service of the image he has in mind. The printed shots are so many work models that enable him to create the image, sometimes abstracting it to the point of freeing it from all temporality and making it perfectly unique.