Pascal Amoyel
Tant que notre heure durera
Pascal Amoyel holds an MFA from the French National School of Photography (Arles) and a MA degree in Contemporary History, Université Paris 1 Sorbonne. His projects focuses on specific facets of cities, regions or countries such as history, geography, culture, while staying open to serendipity and to the small accidents specific to analog photography. In the resulting series, Pascal combines straight pictures and intuitive sequencing, turning territories into personal places. The conjunction of documentary style photographs and lyrical approach, subtly modifying our perception of these territories, makes his work singular. He broadens his approach of photography with different practices that are the many forms of a relationship with images : curating, teaching, book design. More specifically, he’s working on the place of photography inside the space of the book. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and is held by the Print and Photography Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Artothèque of Annecy as well as by private collectors. He lives and works in France.
Tant que notre heure durera is an exhibition of photographs taken by Pascal Amoyel on a daily basis. In it, he looks for ways to be in the world through photography, to measure the distance to be kept from beings and things, from what is offered to the eye.
For several years, Pascal Amoyel has been building up a photographic collection of images taken on various occasions. Fragments collected from day to day, these photographs show members of his family, his immediate environment and the things on which his gaze stops. Perhaps, as Michelangelo Antonioni suggests, looking and finding how to live are one and the same thing.
Conceived as opposed to a diary (in which the images transcribe a history already lived), this work is, in itself, the creation, from these photographs, of a possible personal trajectory. Through the pooling of images, their meeting, the echo between motifs, places and times, the form elaborated on the wall creates a family history.
How to be an Is and a father, how to be a brother? Amoyel writes the history of his family and draws his place in it, as a passer-by, between his parents and his sons.
The central theme of the passage is acting between generations, between places, between people. To be a ferryman is to live out one’s first name, Pascal, which comes from Pesach (Easter), the festival of passage, of freedom.</div>How to be an Is and a father, how to be a brother? Amoyel writes the history of his family and draws his place in it, as a passer-by, between his parents and his sons.
