israel Ariño - L'envol

Exhibition December 2, 2023 to May 5, 2024
Musée Jean-Claude Boulard – Carré Plantagenêt
2 Rue Claude Blondeau, 72100 Le Mans

In 2023, the Festival de l’image association, which organises Les Photographiques, launched its second residency for photographic creation. Following a call for projects and selection by a jury, the residency was awarded to Israel Ariño, a Spanish artist who lives between France and Spain.

For several years now, Israel Ariño has been interested in each of his projects as much in geographical space – the territory and its inhabitants – as in mental space – the interiority of vision. During the six weeks he spent working in Le Mans, his main preoccupation was to try and reveal what makes a place special, in terms of what is unique about it, but also in terms of what it evokes from a sensitive, emotional and subjective point of view. He takes the time to contemplate, to observe, to detect in the elements of the ordinary what may be of the order of the extraordinary. With the particular rhythm of the walk, the detours, and the photographic camera, he offers a narrative made up of the capture of gestures, faces, urban landscapes, presences or absences that constitute a reading beyond the surface of things. Sensitive to light and matter, Israel Ariño’s photographic work uses the medium itself as a means of questioning, transcending and reinventing reality. His mastery of photography and the art of printing enable him to create, from ordinary reality, a universe that carries within it so many evocations of the marvellous. He is represented in France by the VU agency and Galerie VU.