Gisèle Donon is an architect. She is passionate about black & white silver gelatin photography. The technique requires careful application, leaving no room for hesitation or error. a triumphal achievement.
Focused on light, Gisèle's pigmented prints require meticulous work on the luminous whites, the shades of gray and deep blacks ; conjuring backlights, perpendicular sunrays or morning mists. Her dense renderings conjure up paul stand or lucien hervé.
Tackling the arc de triomphe, wrapped posthumously from plans drawn up by Christo and his spouse Jeanne-Claude, gisèle highlights fragments in order to draw out their vibrant details. This otherwise highly symbolic monument suddenly appears mysterious.
Gisèle Donon proves that silver gelatin is still relevant, not an outdated practice ; and that it is related to the art of drawing, which she also practices. Her impressions on cotton paper invite us to enter a country of enigmatic contrasts.
Karin Müller
L’arc de triomphe, wrapped is celebrated in its cosmic reality. Incandescent light and sideral darkness confront each other. Photography, taken in its material reality, distances itself from a narrative approach and seeks to conjure a stripped-down, purely plastic expression devoid of informative references and technical effects. The images veer between the real and abstraction, between photography and drawing. the pigmented edition transposes the works into a species of graphic surfaces anchored onto cotton paper.
These graphic works play with form, with line, with light and with the materials used by christo and jeanne-claude : projected volumes, vertical folds and transversal ropes, woven and reflective canvas.
The eye teases out details from a tight field and a specific framework. Formal research is made possible by the choice of black & white silver gelatin, whose rigour serves a simplified image, with dichotomous compositional elements between line and field, between mass and rythm, between brilliant white and deepest black, between tension and equilibrium.
Particular attention is paid to pure, total black. Becoming a uniform, two-dimensional surface, black invades the image. A black whose materiality is accentuated by its physical presence, matt and toned.
A black through which the subject reveals itself.
Gisèle Donon
Galerie Gimpel & Müller
La Galerie Gimpel & Müller présente et défend essentiellement la peinture abstraite d’après-guerre. Trois tendances sont privilégiées : l’abstraction géométrique, l’abstraction lyrique et le cinétisme.