Joël Denot - The Color of Light

Joël Denot's photographs escape gaze as well as classification. They are neither figurative nor abstract, they are simultaneously part of a pictorial thought as well. They are above all, shape and color. They are beyond the image. Colored surfaces floating in the void, framing each other and projecting shadows of overlapping colors: orange then pale pink then blue then bright pink; red then green then pink then grey-blue. A succession of planes floating in the colored void that surrounds them. Whilst in a corner, if you look closely, another form, that of a body gradually appearing out of a seemingly ethereal space, or suddenly disappearing out of sight entirely, comes into play. The body of the artist that starts to work, and it is inside this work that he finds, once again, the photographic trace that the rest of the image would otherwise make you forget, hence articulating the pictorial and photographic gesture through the picture of this body that manifests itself on paper.

Joël Denot was born in Rennes (France), in 1961. Buying his first camera at the age of 16 was a turning point in his life, leading to the fashioning and discovery of the world of images. He became first a studio photographer, then a photojournalist, in 1980s Paris. Suffering from depression in 1993, he locked himself away and started taking photos of a white interior wall. He established his procedure right from the start: he would make a series of some thirty photographs a year of a white interior wall using natural light and one-off prints. Each series was the result of long deliberation on notes regarding the lighting conditions, the history of photography (and art in general), and on his life in the various places he lived. Joël Denot now lives in southern France and has followed the same procedure for the past thirty years.