Daniel Gustav Cramer
Tales

Curated by Lilian Froger
Presented in partnership with L'Imagerie centre d'art

From the very beginning of his career, Daniel Gustav Cramer has divided his work between photography, video, sculpture and the writing of short texts, resulting in both exhibitions and the publication of books. Using landscape as a starting point (a turquoise sea, a pine forest, a mountain lake), the works of the German artist, born in 1975, take the form of micro-tales whose meaning gradually becomes clear through the succession of images.

The Tales series, begun in 2000, is particularly representative of this approach, combining photographic sequences organised in diptychs, triptychs or larger groups of images. In each sequence, an ordinary landscape is photographed from a distance, generally featuring a discreet element somewhere in the scene. From one image to the next, this element moves or changes, thereby constituting the central thread of a story: a dog by the side of a road, watching the passers-by, a ray of sun glinting on snow-covered ground, a boat sailing over the water until it disappears out of the frame… The artist is showing man in his environment, showing how places are shaped by the people who live in them and pass through them and vice versa. Even without a human figure, the spectator is invited to perceive traces of activity, to imagine what is going on there, to imagine himself there.

In his photographs and in the texts and objects (sculptures, publications, etc.) which the artist sometimes exhibits with his images, he focusses on showing moments of suspension, caught just before something happens. He extends the time we are waiting, at the risk of interrupting the narrative, leaving in suspense the people photographed as well as the spectator looking at them. Time seems to have slowed down in his images, nothing seems to be really happening. Nothing remarkable, in any case. Yet out of this meagre resource there nevertheless comes a profusion of stories, presented in a fragmented way, and echoing each other, in the exhibition space.

The exhibition at Passerelle is the first such wide-scale presentation of the Tales series.