NYAB Event - Jean-Paul Cattin "Motel de Founex"

Jean-Paul Cattin "Motel de Founex"

Masters & Pelavin

This event has ended.

Masters & Pelavin presents a solo exhibition of recent work by Swiss artist, Jean-Paul Cattin. The show includes large scale photographic prints mounted behind plexiglass and is accompanied by a full color publication. This is Cattin’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, and in New York City.

Jean-Paul Cattin was born in Geneva in 1964 and currently lives and works between Geneva, Switzerland and New York, United States. A celebrated contemporary photographer, Cattin is best known for his large-scale highly detailed abstract photographs of walls, floors, garbage trucks and other terrestrial materials. His imagery, often originating in cosmopolitan settings—urban elements taken from the places the artist explores—are laboriously worked in post-production and often contrasted to the extreme. The artist’s photographs have a strong emphasis on the organic and poetic, which distills the essence of the photographic moment—a flash of light on a sensitized surface—emphasizes themes of transformation and perception. Cattin seeks not to describe an object with the detailed clarity of traditional photography, but rather in ghostly manifestations of light and shadow. Using a digital camera with a very high resolution (sixty million pixels) Cattin is able to produce extremely detailed prints that borrow from the strategies of fashion, commercial, and advertising photography. He cradles intimate, complex subjects—fear, nostalgia, memory, loss—in images of notable size and simplicity.

As with much of Cattin’s past work, this exhibition at Masters & Pelavin exists between documentary and staged photography, like a type of fictionalized documentary. The basis for this show derives from photographs taken within an abandoned and forgotten motel situated on the border of a highway close to Geneva, Switzerland. In the seventies and eighties, Motel de Founex was populated by “night-owls” and young tourists enjoying evening long parties. Since then, the building has fallen into disrepair and decrepitude. Cattin moves his images beyond the simple “straight photography” style, now so often used to document such urban decay. With great precision, and in a manner similar to photographer Edward Weston, Cattin presents his viewers with close-up photographs of the motels desolate, inhospitable interiors. To reveal an essence of what lies before his lens, Cattin redefines the codes of documentary photography by digitally reinterpreting each picture in a totally abstract and graphical manner. The results of Cattin’s post-production are reminiscent of the abstract paintings of Pierre Soulages and Gerhard Richter.

Predominately black with subtle shifts in tone and hints of saturation, the works in this exhibition are printed as large as 60 × 108 inches—each one technically admirable. The images in this show are romantically nostalgic yet eerily haunting. It is apparent that Cattin’s constructed narratives are very controlled, although at first glance they might be perceived as spontaneous tableaux. In these abstractions of peeled paint, decayed fabric and cracked concrete the viewer observes a succession of images full of the promise of the unknown with all its epiphanies and dangers. Cattin’s images take us to this abstract and romantic place where the footprints of time are continuously revealed throughout the exhibition.