Guillaume Herbaut & Stéphane Duroy — De l’Ukraine : ceci est la guerre
From 18 november to 23 décember 2022
Galerie VU’ – Hôtel Paul Delaroche
58 rue Saint-Lazare, 75009 Paris
Opening in the presence of the artists on Thursday 17 November 2022
6.30 pm – 9 pm
22 November from 7pm – Meeting about the exhibition with Stéphane Duroy, Guillaume Herbaut and Michel Poivert.
They are not war photographers, and both seek to free themselves from the spectacular. Here, photography and painting meet, confront and respond to each other, in their capacity or incapacity to declare that this is war. Here, photography becomes the medium of duration and painting the medium of immediacy (as Eugène Delacroix wrote, “A painter must know how to catch a worker falling from a scaffold in the time it takes to fall”). Where photography fails to convey absolute atrocity, where painting provides no elements of understanding of the context, the meeting of their works, which are ultimately complementary, translates the possibilities and limits of representation, perception and reception of each medium.
Guillaume Herbaut has been photographing Ukraine for 20 years. From his very first images, in 2001, the seeds of conflict were already smouldering. Then came the Orange Revolution, the Maidan Revolution, the annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbass and the Russian invasion. While the working conditions of war photographers have become difficult, so restricted are they in their freedom of movement, Guillaume Herbaut’s photographs are the fruit of a long-term project, a form of intimacy with the inhabitants and a deep knowledge of the country, its society and its history. Free of sensationalism, and on the margins of the direct capture of the conflict, his images reveal the roots of the war. More than showing it, they underlie it and bring out the convulsions of the former Soviet empire.
Stéphane Duroy, whose career initially moved away from reportage to build a body of work questioning the relationship to the history of 20th century Europe, marked by two atrocious wars, does not photograph the Ukrainian conflict. He has been painting it every day since the first day of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. He has never been directly there, but, fed by information and testimonies, he establishes a personal diary of the conflict by accumulating paintings. Each one tells of the war and its atrocities still being played out on the European continent.
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Hôtel Paul Delaroche
58 rue Saint Lazare, 75009 Paris
+33 1 53 01 85 85
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