> Sophia Kirch
About « Entre Soleils »
Poetry.
Not only the words, but also the images. And above all, the energy that emanates from their meet.
Poetry, thought as a clash of two different temporalities: the simultaneity of the image, the linearity of writing. The eye thinks it can embrace the image in its entirety, but it weaves meaning in the hollow of the words following an order imposed by the language. The image is illumination, a flash reminiscent of the flash of lightning in a dark sky. The text is rising from a star, progressive revelation of a light for those who have the patience to wait.
However, there is a time when words and images can maintain a dialogue beyond collision, from the clash of conflicting lights. And perhaps even hint at the possibility of a fusion, always imminent, without ever switching over to it completely.
This hour is the one the writer Shmuel T. Meyer, winner of the 2021 Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle, refers to the expression “Between suns”, which can be found in Kibbutz, the second collection of short stories in his trilogy devoted to by the Goncourt. This formula, translated from Hebrew, finds its equivalent in French in the expression “between dog and wolf”. It also gives its title to the art-book Entre-Soleils, where shows the meeting of a writer, Shmuel T. Meyer, and a plastic photographer, Michel Kirch.
The writer thus gives his view of two triptychs by the photographer, » Under the cherry tree » from the « Homo Fukushima » series as well as « Dérives » from the « Climats et Atmosphères" series, through a poem.
Nourished by the Jewish culture common to the two artists, this text offers a reading of the photographs that it accompanies in the light of Genesis. The words then reveal the complexity of the images, where creation and destruction merge in a common process: these are post-apocalyptic landscapes that are delivered to us, through the advent of a new age of man disrupting the whole universe. The « Homo Fukushima » and « Climats » series thus touch on past and future cataclysms, while questioning the place of man and the living in these landscapes that worry and touch on the sublime. The procession of Butô dancers and Shinto monks, of a ghostly whiteness, becomes in the poem a shift from the era of angels to the era of man.
From love to freedom, the text then ends with a gap: that of the possibility of the worst, which defines man, and is at the heart of the concerns of the « Homo Fukushima » and « Climats » series. It is then nature that becomes the painful imprint of this free will.
In its interpretative approach, the poem does not muffle the language of the image: on the contrary, it makes its silences resonate.
This meeting between two poets, in the hollow of the hour before dusk, is made possible by a unique bias and know-how. The book is also the work of a publishing house, Le Renard Pâle, which knew how to give a setting to the dialogue. Describing themselves as "book artists", publishers Patricia Dupuy and Bernard Soria created a bespoke form for Entre-Soleils. Sumptuous as a jewel, a black leather box houses the works. Its opening is a visual and tactile ceremony, as the poem and the triptychs unfold. Entre-Soleils belongs to the Téménos collection, "sacred space" in Greek. From this meeting between writer, artist and publishers, we retain the feat of having been able to give a temple to the eternal lamps of poetry.
Sophia Kirch