UA young man is sitting on the tarmac. His hair is soaked with sweat, his muscles tense. In his right hand, hidden in a kraft paper wrapper, a carton of milk. The liquid flies through the air, forming a strange shape. The image looks like a stolen photo, signed by a street photographer, those who roam the cities in search of the perfect framing. Except that this cliché, Milk, dating from 1984, is not improvised. Its author, the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, staged it in detail: the pose of the model, the movement of the arm that throws the milk in the air, the humidity of the hair…
The photograph is undoubtedly one of the best known in the career of the artist, born in 1946, who has never ceased, with his clear, precise images, to blur the registers. Documentary? fiction ? Both or neither. Trouble arises in front of each of his photos, around fifty of which are exhibited from January 28 to April 21 at the Fondation Beyeler, near Basel, in Switzerland, and a selection of which will be presented each week in M The magazine of the World, until April.
The question is not only: what do we see?, but: what do we look at? A still image or a screenshot from a movie? A photograph or a sculpture, many photos being presented on light boxes? First degree or irony? Each time, there is no certain answer. No more than among the great masters of art history, those that Jeff Wall studied tirelessly in Canada or in London, notably at the famous Courtauld Institute, and whom he described extensively in numerous essays.
Cavalcade of ideas
And he has never stopped referring to these classics since his beginnings. The Destroyed Room (1978), a vision of a ransacked bedroom, takes up the structure of The Death of Sardanapalus, by Eugène Delacroix. The enigmatic female character of Picture for Women (1979), where Jeff Wall appears in the frame, has the same posture as that ofA bar at the Folies-Bergère, by Edouard Manet. Other works recall Hokusai, Géricault, Goya or Velázquez…
Production conditions: time spent on each pose, identity of the models… we know nothing. It’s up to us, the spectators, to imagine. And then to think. Because Jeff Wall’s photographs are so many stimuli, sparks to the cavalcade of ideas. Let’s take Mimic (1982). On a deserted street, an elegant individual walks past a couple dressed much more casually. The man gives the passerby the finger. For what ? Racism – the recipient is Asian? Without a doubt. But the field is left free to the imagination.
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