| ‘Industrial
silhouettes’
From
his technical training days, Alexandre Vitkine has retained
a feeling for precision and detail. The stark contrast of
finely chiselled shapes against a white background evokes
in turn a cinema screen and Chinese shadow theatre; an efficiency
of image that, without ever seeking out the grand or the eloquent,
tells the bare bones of a story the only equal of which might
be the subtle poetry of Japanese sketches.
Born in Berlin in 1910, Vitkine was the product of an era
defined by scientific and technological progress. Having forged
a career in industry as an electromechanical engineer, he
himself is the portrayal and raw material for his works. But
the century Vitkine is witness to also included the failings
and perversities brought about by science and technical advances.
In its way, his photography acknowledges this schizophrenia
and fluctuates between a celebration of the tool and angst
over the inhumanity hinted at by industrial machinery. In
this abstract world where extremely taut lines define geometric
spaces reminiscent as much of Mondrian as railway tracks with
sinister connotations, man, a tiny, fragile silhouette adjusting
a neon light, or on the point of being squashed by a concrete
block and forever immobilised by his objective, always seems
to represent this slippery balance, a metaphor for the paradoxes
of contemporary ergonomics. Therein lies the philosophical
reasoning behind Vitkine’s works. For beyond their purely
aesthetic quality, they prompt reflection on the rapport between
man and machine.
If the artist’s photographs, entitled ‘industrial
silhouettes’ are a visual representation of our mechanised
environment, it is the technique and its scientific mode of
operation that produces, with the artist calling the shots,
the dehumanised perfection of shapes and lines.
If Vitkine appears at first sight to be the amalgamation of
all artistic reflection of the 20th Century, seeming in turn
to nod to Mondrian, Léger, Giacometti or Vasarely,
his work is none the less unique and utterly original. A testimony
to modern art, Vitkine is also a precursor. Since the onset
of the 60s, an industrial installation’s jumble of metal,
and the eye’s fascination with the tangle of pipes and
chimney stacks, anticipates in its clichés the architectural
constructions of one Renzo Piano, the designer of the Pompidou
Centre.
But
beyond these grand references, Alexandre Vitkine stands out
with a style purely his own. An unexpected poetry always rises
modestly and subtly to the surface, the beauty of art in its
most transparent simplicity.
©
Michaël Prazan
Exhibitions:
1960 Brasilia (Bresil)
1964 Paris - Société Nationale des Beaux Arts
Paris Studio 28 Club Photographique de Paris
1965 Paris - Club Photographique de Paris -
9e exposition
Buenos Aires - Libre expression - Argentine
Paris - Societé des Artistes Décoratifs
1966 Israël - Centre Culturel Français Itinérant
Moscou – URSS - Inter Press Photo
1972 Club Photographique de Paris
1976 Bobigny -
Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint Denis
150 Ans de Photographie Française
1980 Paris - Grand Palais - Salon d'Automne 1980
1987 Malmö - Institut Français - Suède
Public Collections:
1964 Paris - Bibliothèque nationale de France
1972 Saint Maur des Fossés – Archives Départementales
du Val de Marne
1974 Toulon - Musée
1997 Paris - Maison Européenne de la Photographie
2002 En Harod - Museum of Art – Israël
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2006 Hackelbury Fine Art, Ltd. Copyright for all images is
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