The Absent Forms

2010 - Photography (Photography)
10 min 40

Charlotte Moth asked the art critic Francesco Pedraglio to write a text in response to the Man Ray film “Les Mystères du Château de Dé”, the decor of which was the Villa Noailles, built by Mallet-Stevens. Pedraglio’s text was then displaced since the artist attributed it to her own photographs taken on the rue Mallet-Stevens in Paris. A percussionist gave a audio response to the film during the opening at the Halle fu?r Kunst in Lüneburg, in 2010. His reaction was then edited into the film. Thus the artist articulated several subjectivities to which we add our own. Light is a major protagonist in her work. Photography is envisaged from an uncertain point of view in terms of its usage, like live matter, formless, malleable and modular. With no title or date, the images express chance and thrilling juxtapositions. Although the darkroom remains the photographer’s tool, Charlotte Moth deals with the image as a sculptor. Through the image, architecture, citation and decor become dematerialized or materialized sculpture.

Charlotte Moth has been constituting an image bank since 1999. She photographs and develops black and white photographs taken in places she passes through around the world. With the eye of a sculptor, she records Modernist architecture in Brazil, Bauhaus style in Germany, empty spaces, out of time. Thus she creates a classification of different types of spaces (different species). This Travelogue, as she calls it, is an organic process, a collage, an activity revealing connections between image and experience. Entirely black and white and with great economy (identical formats, modest sizes), the images convey an obsession with line, order, construction and emptiness. Charlotte Moth doesn’t only have a nostalgic gaze on these spaces since she also proposes multiple readings. Acting as assembler, collector and archivist, she introduces a distanced point of view on her own work. With a Post-Conceptual approach, the artist proposes an in-depth and ambitious conception of the nature of the image and its authority. Charlotte Moth was born in Carshalton (UK) in 1978, and has been living in Paris since 2007.

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