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William Eggleston, Paris at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, 4 april - 21 june 2009

It is a well-known observation that walking the streets of a foreign city can open up visual awareness in a way that never happens at home.  But for William Eggleston, the three years spent preparing for his latest exhibition at the Fondation Cartier honed not just the art of seeing but also the duration of visual experience.   
Crisp detail and vivid colour have been a hallmark of so many successful and well-known images by Eggleston, and in this way, the Fondation Cartier exhibition does not disappoint.  In one image, legs of a passer-by echo the wavy reflections of two iron poles while rain soaks the street, yielding innumerable reflections of the ambient lights and oozing colour throughout the greyness. In another work, a street labourer gazes at the camera, behind is another man driving a digger and pointing an accusatory finger.  While the human subjects and their relationship could demand further investigation, the colours themselves provide the ‘punctum’ or point of interest that jumps out from the surface.  The bright yellow of the tape measure echoes that of the digger and the stripe on the man’s hat, and the green of the urban hoarding plays with the green of a nearby label. Once the eye is attuned to Eggleston’s frequency, it is impossible to take in an image in a quick glance.  The disparity between the time it took to make one image and the time it takes to decipher it grows while the viewer continues the flow of the exhibition.

In Eggleston’s Paris, the macrocosm conflates to the micro-level of observation, where sociological enquiry is combined with pure visual enjoyment of rhyming colours seen in the street, on the pavement and on passers-by.  About half of the works are framed together with Eggleston’s small pen and ink drawings whose colours and lines evoke the artist’s declared enthusiasm for Kandinsky but can also be read as mapping for the visual process used to decode the many levels of his photographs.  The eye darts here and there, looking to read an image and find repeating colours, unresolved perspective or the occasional ‘pictures within pictures’ that often reward the viewer after a long perusal of what at first appears to be a casual snap taken while the artist walked down the street. The curatorial decisions in this exhibition have yielded interesting parallels between the photographic and the mark-making exploration of colour, and perusing both while listening to the gallery’s recording of Eggleston playing Bach on the piano could draw out audio-visual synaesthesia from even the most stubbornly tone-deaf, black-and-white aficionado and might have pleased even Kandinsky himself.

Part of an ongoing series exploring Paris, Eggleston’s works were ostensibly taken while visiting hundreds of well known sites yet they yield very little of the ‘post card’ view of the city.  Instead the artist translates some of his familiar visual vernacular including the reflective play of shop windows, elaborate graffiti and an occasional human subject.  Parisians framed by Eggleston introduce a shot of adrenalin, whether from the blur of motion or the direct gaze of a disgruntled passer-by sitting by the Metro, and reintroduce speed and a little grit into pictures that Eggleston has said could otherwise ‘get too sweet.’

By Christiane Monarchi

• William Eggleston
• John Goto
• Green in Black and White
• Photo London 2007
• Paris Photo 2006
• London Polygon and the book Room
• Jude Wall - Re-form
• Welcome to Britain
• Derek Henderson - The Terrible Boredom of Paradise
• Empty Days by Paddy Summerfield
• Arles 2005
• Boyd & Evans 2005
• Frieze 2004
• Javier Silva Meinal
• Arles 2004
• Frieze 2003
• Happy Vicitims by Kyoichi Tsuzuki

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