Toulouse. Facing the sea, Jacques Mataly creates a whole universe
The Toulouse photographer Jacques Mataly is exhibited with the painter Christine Walcke, until July 13, at the Ombres Blanches gallery in Toulouse.
First a documentary photographer, Jacques Mataly has been a contemplative for several years. His obsession: the sea and the horizon line. The Toulouse artist settles on the shore and takes his time to capture this disturbing moment, between dog and wolf, when water and sky mingle in fascinating shades of color.
Regularly exhibited, the work of Jacques Mataly can be seen again at the bookstore and at the Ombres Blanches gallery in Toulouse, alongside that of the painter Christine Valcke, in large square formats that capture the eye. “Paradoxically, this choice makes it possible to gain in intensity, remarks Jacques Mataly. When they are in front, the visitors are not simply spectators: they penetrate inside the photograph.”
The exhibition is the logical complement to a book, “Seuil dulone”, by Pierre Cendors, in which the writer recounts the loneliness of the walker in the powerful and tormented landscapes of the most harsh and wild Ireland, in l instance the Isle of Skye, famous for its exceptional whisky. “I know the author, who wrote a text based on one of my photographs, in 2020, in the little book Memento Mori. Here, the approach is reversed, my images arriving after those of Cendors, without initial consultation between us.”
“Vigour and slowness”
How then to select the maritime horizons corresponding best to the impressions of the hiking writer?
“It was absolutely necessary to avoid illustrative photography but to approach the spirit of the text; of this dark and cold prose, quite poetic. I read it carefully, I immersed myself in it and I made a choice in this direction so that the two artistic movements feed each other.”
“On Skye, I approached a primary thought, an igneous force of stone, like its landscape carved by the elements with vigor, slowly, to its quintessential core”, writes Pierre Cendors. Just before, Jacques Mataly captured the movement of the swell in a shade of gray. A few pages later, the gray is still there, in a heavy sky, on an ocean that hesitates to go towards blue. A large yellow trace cuts the whole, marking the offensive presence of the sun…