“Let’s Get Lost” is a journey through time in which black-and-white photography evokes the legacy of postwar abstract painting and the spellbinding spirit of jazz.
The photographs taken by Fanny Giniès over the past five years transcend reality to become photographic paintings: details of weathered walls and urban textures that, through her lens, are transformed into compositions reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism (Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko) or
Lyrical Abstraction (Georges Mathieu, Pierre Soulages).
Drawn to the traces of human presence, Fanny Giniès delights in scrutinizing surfaces in Paris, Arles, or elsewhere—true palimpsests where every piece of graffiti, scratch, or layer of paint tells the story of the Anthropocene. Like trompe-l’œil paintings, her images open up a window to another world and invite the viewer to lose themselves, as suggested by the exhibition’s title, borrowed from Chet Baker.
Here, photography is not a means of transporting the viewer to an event, a place, or an object, but seeks to transform the substance of the world into poetry—a quest for formal exploration where lines, rhythms, and contrasts take precedence over the subject.
Characterized by spontaneous brushwork and an expressive use of materials, postwar abstract painting shares a profound philosophy with jazz music: from Charlie Parker’s bebop to the cool jazz of Miles Davis and Chet Baker, and on to John Coltrane’s free jazz. Fanny Giniès’s photographs evoke, through free association, the very essence of these two musical and pictorial movements: subtle imperfection, deliberate dissonances, the trace of an absent presence, and the beauty of a stolen moment.
“Let’s Get Lost” is an ode to the imagination: like a standard reinterpreted endlessly, the exhibition awakens the collective memory and conveys shared emotions. To borrow the words of Tennessee Williams: “In memory, everything seems to happen in music.” Here, everything seems to unfold in black and white, in shadows and traces, between silences and resonances.
