Initiated in 2020 for his exhibition at the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris, based on the painting by Ruisdael in the museum’s collections, the Catalytic Compositions series continues as a variation on the same theme. The artworks have been included in a number of collections, including those of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
While the title properly makes reference to chemistry, Aëgerter’s Compositions catalytiques play with an optical phenomenon. Working with reproductions of landscapes painted by the Dutch artist Jacob van Ruisdael, Aëgerter has placed perpendicularly to the vertical plane of the canvas and at differing heights, depending on the composition of each painting – a mirror on a plane extending from the line which, in the painting, separates the sky from the earth’s surface. The lower part of the canvas is thus hidden from view, but the mirror reveals to us another possible landscape. In the novel simplicity of their compositions and the salient expressivity of the clouds, the images evoke the landscapes of Normandy created by Gustave Le Gray, who was a painter before becoming a pioneer of the medium of photography and developing the technique called ciel rapporté. This technique allowed him, by integrating two distinct negatives into a single image during the printing process, to get around the disparity in the luminosity of sky and landscape. For Aëgerter, too, photography is an activity that traffics in manipulation and illusion, where magic holds sway. The doubling of the image in Compositions catalytiques – which again involves a reversal, but one that mimics the upside-down inversion produced by the mirror
of a reflex camera and observed directly by those who work with a
large- format camera – plunges us into a novel space, one that operates a renewal of sense (and of the senses); plunges us into reverie, even meditation. [extract] Upending the gaze by Sonia Voss for the solo show In praise of the double of Laurence Aëgerter at the Galerie Binome, 2022
Work references
Collection
Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Exhibitions
Laurence Aëgerter, Eurojust, The Hague, Netherlands, 2021
Éloge du double, Galerie Binome, Paris, 2021
Ici mieux qu’en face, Musée du Petit Palais, Paris, 2020
Publication
Ici mieux qu’en face, exhibition catalog, Actes Sud editions, 2020