Biographie
Valence (France) 1981. Graduating from the ENSP, Arles, Marine Lanier has, since 2006, pursued a body of work strongly influenced by literature and the cinema. Her work has been published and exhibited in France, Europe, China, and in the United States.
Présentation
Marine Lanier is one of those paradoxical photographers whose practice, though firmly inscribed in the reality of a place and a time, seeks to extract itself from it. In the series she has been creating since 2006, the present turns to the past, the lived experience is charged with the imaginary, and the familiar opens up to the strange: the real passes through the filter of the eye and the shot, which refuse any form of objectivity and any idea of transparency.
Thus, far from being a report on the clandestine border economy of goods and people - but rich in its mythology -, "Les Contrebandiers" is a poetic evocation of a discreet and nomadic marginality embodied by the few human silhouettes that populate it. The latter, although withdrawn into themselves or their gestures, dialogue with mountain landscapes that they might have crossed and makeshift objects - a tin cup, a knife, a book - that might belong to them.
The alternation of the types of motifs is matched by variations in distance and warmth. If the planes - close, medium, distant - depend on the subjects - objects, bodies, landscapes - this is not the case for the temperature of the colors. They tend towards grey, blue or gold monochrome, are snowy or burning with the sun's rays. Their association with darkness or clarity is amplified by the metallic, matte or shiny supports of the prints. Without systematism, in an apparently intuitive way, Marine Lanier crosses the ternary rhythms to make circulate the glance between sensations, feelings, states and energies contrasted - not to say opposed.
We find in "Les Contrebandiers" many features of the photographer's previous works. The first is the taste for symbols. The titles are nouns preceded by definite articles, giving the images a generic emblematic value: La Fatigue will follow L'Ascension, but Le Brouillard will oppose L'Éclaircie. The second is, in fact, their tension. "The Sun of Wolves" (2015-18) already confronted day and night but Marine Lanier seemed to resolve the contradiction by bathing in eclipse light the lives of two children on the inverted relief of a volcanic plateau. The series "Les Contrebandiers" exacerbates polarities. The administrative and legal borders, which the men and women she has photographed seem to play with, disappear in front of sensitive, even existential borders, born of the mountain and its contrasts.
This is why it is finally wrong to speak of landscape. With Marine Lanier, nature is not contemplated but experienced while being imagined. It is an environment, a milieu, both physical and fantasized. Hence these variations between the images. Hence their veiled atmosphere. Hence these absorbed figures. Hence this light which, cold or hot, unites us to the world. With Marine Lanier, it is not a question of point of view, but of point of immersion.
Étienne Hatt - Editor in chief of Art Press
Work carried out within the framework of the national commission Flux, une société en mouvement, CNAP 2020