Daniel Gustav Cramer
Two Works

La Sellerie, the Aurillac Museum is reopening to the public with a solo-exhibition of new works by Daniel Gustav Cramer. Since the beginning of his career, the artistic practice of Cramer is divided between photography, short texts, video works and sculpture, leading to both exhibitions and publication of books. His photographic oeuvre uses landscape as a starting point – a dark forest, a mountain lake, the ocean – but gradually reveals its true meaning behind the obvious image. The narrative dimension is undoubtedly essential: each image on its own is a fragment like a micro-story. Nothing is explicit and the stories are really only complete when the viewer assembles the individual pieces in his mind.

Particularly representative is Cramer`s Tales series, initiated in 2000, which shows sequences of photographs organized in diptychs, triptychs or more consequent groups of images. Each time, a landscape is photographed from afar, with a small element punctuating the scene. From one image to the next, this element moves or changes, thus constituting the core of a narrative: a tire that rolls in the desert and moves towards the foreground, a boat that runs on water until it disappears from the frame, people walking on a footbridge by the sea, an elderly woman thinking at her window. These scenes open to interpretation have also been the subject of publications, each of these short stories can lead to a book with an assertive formal sobriety, containing only a sequence of images, without text.

For his exhibition in Aurillac, Daniel Gustav Cramer shows a text work (Unterfeldhaus, Germany, June 17, 1983, 2010), as well as a new installation of 21 prints. The story takes place in Japan and is composed of a mountain river, a pebble beach and some rocks. Teenagers appear while they are playing with water guns along a river. A light mist floats over the water, tinted in the golden dusk. Then the fog intensifies, until it gradually covers up the river and teenagers. One does not know how much time may have elapsed between the first and last shot. At first glance, nothing really seems to happen, nothing spectacular in any case, but the impact of the changes in the landscape, imperceptible at first, become more pronounced as one contemplates the images.