It rains, Paris, 1st July 2000

2004 - Photography (Photography)
57 x 75 cm

It rains, Paris, 1st July 2000 , which could be the refrain of a song, is the title of a photograph of a minimal moment, the vision of a Parisian pedestrian, a cut flower lying on the pavement covered in rain drops. Is this moment captured by chance or a mise en scène? There is a sort of hiatus in the image; the planes – motif and background – connect nature in full bloom, pure, fragile, ephemeral with the grey weighty tarmac. The calm of the raindrops in It rains, Paris, 1st July 2000 contrasts with the gushing in La Fontaine des Amoureux, Paris, 3 avril 2006 . Contrary to Nœud coulant (also in the Kadist collection) that opens up possibilities for thought and research, the elements of this photograph are organized like a rhizome. The raindrops and the flower petals form a network of points which the spectator can mentally link and recompose. On one hand tightly knit, dispersed on the other. The motif tends to fuse with the background to create one unique plane. The image generally tends towards a certain flatness, rather like medieval tapestries in the Mille fleurs style or in fabrics with flowery prints. In the recent “Fleurs” series (2008), the artist photographed wild flowers, placing them in front of colored backgrounds that extract them from their natural pastoral setting.

After training in literature and working in advertising, Jean-Luc Moulène became known in the 1990s for his ‘documentary’ photographic practice. His images could be considered as studies of natural and cultural phenomena; the Objets de grève ( Strike objects) series (1999) documents objects made in factories during social protests. Moulène uses the codes of media images and diverts them to liberate the gaze and produce a new imaginary. This poetic tactic is manifest in the series called Disjonctions , in which Moulène photographs still lives, portraits, daily urban scenes. The notion of disjunction, which can be interpreted in the grammatical sense (‘or’, ‘either… either…’) or in terms of logic (an alternative in a dilemma), is manifest in the image by the disunity of the elements in the composition. The artist is not just a photographer, he increasingly creates relations with drawing, sculpture, objects, texts and newspapers.