2014 acquisitions

The photograph that the author has given to the Musée Réattu collections (pigment ink print, 100 x 150 cm Ex. 1/8), was originally specially produced for the exhibition Rodin, la lumière de l'antique, held at the Musée départemental Arles antique from 6th April to 1^st September 2013. Back then it was presented opposite an original bronze by Auguste Rodin, produced during the winter of 1864-1865 and called L’Homme au nez cassé.
In the winter of 1864-1865, Rodin produced a portrait of a man from his studio, Bibi, whose extremely troubled facial expressions seem to particularly interest the artist, who uncompromisingly models his deformed crushed nose and marked lines by a tough life. He exhibited the work for the first time at the Salon in 1865, in the form of a bronze mask. The incomplete nature – heralding his future work on partial figures – combined with the realism of the face resulted in him being refused. But this work visibly represents a key stage in the sculptor’s work.
Presented once again at the Salon in 1875, L’Homme au nez cassé was accepted, but this was a more academic version of it carved in marble, which draws heavily on the vocabulary of ancient statuary.
The photograph L’Homme au nez cassé is part of a broader photographic series, called Figures du pouvoir. Olivier Roller focuses on the question of power, examining four types of different models: effigies of Roman emperors, reflecting the origins of power and its vainglory; today’s men of power, referring equally to the hiding power of authority and the fantasy that it represents; his mother, the ultimate symbol of family authority; lastly self-portrait, in which he explores the relationship between photographer and model from an unusual angle. The resulting images, subject to scrutiny that ignores any form of compromise, just like Rodin serve as so many embodiments of varying aspects of power, its legacy over time, from transmission to decline. The very tight framing of his images, capturing only the heads, isolating or detaching them from the body, just like the intensely dark background in which he immerses the forms, draws parallels between the work of a photographer and that of a sculptor, in the sense that both aesthetical approaches are achieved by removing material. Likewise, the enlargement of the images, produced with a digital camera, is taken to the extreme where the pixel, contemporary photographic grain, encounters the grain of the stone, giving the image the impression of a third dimension, enhanced by dramatic lighting markedly accentuating the volumes and details of the sculpture.