Melting ice caps, climate catastrophe, upheavals in the elements around us. What remains of this time that weighs on our shoulders? The Binôme gallery in Paris is currently devoting an exhibition to Jean-Louis Sarrans’ photographic works. With Tomorrow, same time, the artist confronts Man with Nature in a superior otherness, and questions fragile human destiny in the light of major changes. Here’s how it works.
Most will say it’s urgent to act, others that it’s already too late. Jean-Louis Sarrans’ photographic works are not about words, but rather about the strange encounter between the contemplation of a world that is disappearing and the brevity of human existence. Contemplation of slow decay, ” says the artist, who has traveled the world to show, without sadness or fatalism, the icebergs breaking off the pack ice alongside the beautiful garbage on New York sidewalks. 
Nature, almost unreal and still untouched by human invasion, seems to stand in stark contrast to urbanity at its most extreme, where even the garbage cans smell clean. And yet… Jean-Louis Sarrans’ dytics echo man’s inability to take the world’s otherness into account, through analogies of line and form, and through a choice of blue or red colors . Without any aggression, in a few monumental frescoes – four diptychs, a triptych and a set of nine panels – the artist invites us to enter a time other than that of the incessant race engendered by the dissatisfaction of desire. Time for reflection, time to stimulate the imagination, the only inexhaustible resource…
Time, that thing that connects us to the absolute… It’s almost an obsession with Jean-Louis Sarrans. If time defines the work itself, shapes it, transforms it, gives it life, it is also the very essence of his photographic paintings. Mélancholia, a monumental fresco in nine tableaux, is a fine example. Everything unfolds through relationships,” explains the artist, who initially had the idea of showing snippets of decomposition and vegetation. And then, “over time”, this fresco called forth a dark mass at its center. I needed a powerful image. The dome of Hiroshima City Hall (the only monument not to have been destroyed in 1945) . As was the choice of red. In this fresco, there’s no room for blue. Why is that? Red is the solution to disintegration. It’s the radicalism of the outcome, if it comes…
Jean-Louis Sarrans’ quest since leaving fashion and advertising behind, to devote himself to a more intimate and essential approach to his art, is to find a sensitive bridge between the idea and the real. I stay with abstract things to take the real part away from what it shows,” he stresses. 
Minimalist approach to get as close as possible to oneself and therefore to others. Silver photographs and images, few shots. My pleasure is to photograph little and not to harass reality with photos. Harassment, explains the artist, it’s a deficiency. When you harass the motif, it means you haven’t mastered the subject. . So, no endless pile of images. A photo can remain in the box, I know it’s there… The artist knows that sooner or later, it will materialize in a work of art. Once again, it’s a question of time. It’s up to us to measure its depth.
Tomorrow, same time – until June 11 at Galerie Binôme in Paris’s Marais district.
www.galeriebinome.com
By Odile Woesland
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