Corinne Vionnet, “Souvenirs d’un glacier”

RRose Editions 2019

Edition of 200 copies
Hardcover
12 color images printed on 200g Papyrus Multi Art Silk
22 x 33 cm
Printed at Grafiche Veneziane
ISBN 978-2-9556712-5-2

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Over the years, Corinne Vionnet has collected postcards of the Rhône glacier, spanning almost of century of images. Strikingly, but not so surprisingly, the pictures chosen have all been shot from the same perspective, from an “ideal” spot that reveals the glacier in its archetypal form and the roads that take us there – as is often the case with touristic attractions – a pattern of repetition and supersposition that Vionnet explored for instance in her Photo Opportunities series. There is a difference, however, between monuments as the Taj Mahal, the Rome Coliseum, the Eiffel Tower and landscapes as the Rhône glacier. The latter is not fixed in eternity. When looking at these postcards, the artist noticed a movement: the gradual melting of the ice, the accelerated “retreat” of the glacier. What was a reflection on space became a gaze on time, or more precisely, the two dimensions intertwined in a sequence of images. As in Vionnet’s work Total Flag, the image converges gradually towards some sort of emptiness or abstraction. The pattern is losing its significance, exhausted to the core. In other words, will we still need postcards of the Rhône glacier any longer ?