Clara Chichin’s photographs are a call to wander. Her work is built on transience, like a chemical balance introducing an imaginative vision into reality. This young French artist’s style aims to disclose the invisible elements of photographic capture.
These colour and black-and-white images depict landscapes bathed in strange lights, from luminescent or incandescent sources, intensified by cold or warm colors, which gives each image a certain aura. The photographer prefers crystalline
refraction, the misty effect of sfumato, a ray of light cutting through the chiaroscuro, the faint clarity of twilight or the looming glare of the darkness of night. The pictorial dimension is evident in her iconoclastic inclination to play with systems
of lighting from different eras. And a re-enactment of an element of the pictorialist tradition of early photography, in a contemporary version which breaks away from this tradition through a deliberately diminished depiction, a subtle rebellion
against the idealist principles of the 19th century. Her photographic processing is marked by obvious wear, a desired loss of reality, while the color work, developed further during printing, alters the colors, thus recalling the techniques of yesteryear.
The aims is rarely to produce a beautiful neat image, ideally framed according to the norms of documentary photography.
The artist prefers indecision and movement in the landscape. Incorporating blurring, visible grains, and sometimes imprecise framing. Even when the image appears objective at first glance, the view offered is not so much the composition of the
landscape, as the sentiment which it inspires in its spaces, voids and depth.
This young artist’s unique photographic style is comparable to the aestetic of Angela Graeurholz or Corinne Mercadier, for the technical «deviances» and the temporary fragility. However, Clara Chichin offers no narrative purpose. Her recording of
the world becomes the reverberation of her own private world, a foggy prism which give a dispersed refraction . Her artist quest can be seen as an extension of the photographic instant.
Christine Ollier, Exhibition Curator
