Guillaume Martial, Footlights

About

Like the ringmaster Monsieur Loyal, Guillaume Martial introduces us to his new show, a playful and offbeat universe of photography filled with the magic of movement and the illusion of reality. So - drum roll! - the red curtain opens up and we enter Footlights!

The first part of Footlights pays tribute to the inventors of the early motion picture and special effects. For the series Animalocomotion, Guillaume Martial uses the chronophotography technique developed by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, a predecessor to cinema. In these photographs presented in light boxes, the photographer turns into various animals by the magic of camerawork, twisting and moving under a simple white sheet. In some other ones, he becomes a fakir or an illusionist, in a theater framed with red curtains or a juggler of chairs in an outdoor field.

The second part of Footlights plunges us into an architecture reclaimed by a disoriented athlete or a dreaming researcher. Guillaume Martial questions his environment: a sports field, a wall in the grass, a building under construction... Acrobat, rope-dancer, contortionist, his character boldly answers by absurdity to the incongruity of urbanism and questions the place left to humans in the contemporary urban landscape. With high precision, each photograph manages to freeze his physical experiment of space in a burlesque snapshot.