WHEN BLACK IS BURNED

2021-2024

The sky is blue and so is the sea...
proof, if it were needed, that Marguerite Bornhauser is a kind of synesthete whose images convey the intensity of her sensory perception of the real, with its suspended moments and fleeting apparitions. For several years now, she has been constructing a photographic and poetic universe that draws on the expressive and emotional power of colour. She has made colour a visual language in its own right, far removed from any documentary project or descriptive rectitude. Following in the footsteps of artists who, from the 1970s onwards, took colour photography beyond its strictly commercial or vernacular register, her approach confirms the turning point described by Michel Frizot: “The arrival of color photography demonstrates that photographic mimicry is merely an illusion, denuded of any kind of automatic nature.

While black and white photography possessed too many connotations of truthfulness, the advent of color photography had, paradoxically, the effect of distancing the image from real life, which it cannot grasp with scientific precision.” From Plastic Colors (2017) to Red Harvest (2019), inspired by Dashiell Hammet’s noir universe, through each one of her series she seizes the opportunity to experiment and push the limits of colour photographic processes to saturation, whether they are purely analogue or the product of digital manipulation; whether she bathes her prints in water or gives them a more sculptural form, as with her most recent works.

In When Black is Burned, a title taken from the lyrics of folk singer Neil Young, more than ever, Marguerite Bornhauser cements the painterly dimension of her images. She admits to looking more to Matisse and abstract painting to construct what might be described as photogenic paintings. By radicalising the work on shadows begun in Red Harvest, she heightens the chromatic density of her images by working with contrasts and flat blacks that take on the subtle texture of ink.

As a neo-pictorialist, she seems to appropriate the dream of the first practitioners of colour photography in the nineteenth century: “to force the sun to paint with the ready-made colours presented to it,” in the words of the inventor Louis Ducos du Hauron. A world away from the early days of photography, Marguerite Bornhauser nevertheless remains in control of her palette, from start to finish. In fact, her sensitive, painterly approach brings her closer to the great contemporary colourist photographers, notably Saul Leiter, another enthusiast of painting, particularly that of the Nabis, as well as Japanese prints. Marguerite Bornhauser shares with Leiter a mastery of different points of view—close-ups, daring shifts, filter effects—that reveal the enigmatic and ambiguous aspects of moments of reality, captured and transfigured by photographic manipulation. Somewhere between melancholy and radiant force, Marguerite Bornhauser’s visions invite us to engage in a poetic, intuitive, and meditative experience of our perception of everyday life, which has never been so necessary.

Damarice Amao, associate curator for photography at Musee National d'Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris