Look Through My Eyes and Give Me Your Own

Shot in Georges Braque’s studio in Normandy, France, now overrun by nature, the story of my encounter with a bird straight out of the magic of fairy tales.

In his recent series, Blue with Exceptions, American photographer John Divola inserts the portrait of an AI-generated bird in some dilapidated buildings, a ghostly presence reminiscent of the canaries sacrificed in mines to anticipate firedamp explosions, and now used in English as a proverbial expression of warning. Purely by coincidence, Noëlle Pujol’s new film produces a similar imagery, inviting us to greater aesthetic and environmental sensitivity. Yet this wasn’t what she had come to find in the chirping undergrowth where her camera takes us, but rather George Braque’s studio at Varengeville-sur-Mer, whose state of abandonment beggars belief. We can almost imagine fake popular found-footage from horror films harbouring a forgotten ghostly presence – artist Julien Audebert, who devoted a series to this place some ten years ago, even described it as a forbidden studio. Pujol penetrates it stealthily, gripped by all the signs of a former occupancy. Her meticulous gaze finally settles on a small bird, under the immense windows through which Braque would observe birds in order to paint them. If we know how dear this motif – which he introduced into his Ateliers series in the late 1940s – became to him towards the end of his life, the encounter documented by Pujol becomes all the richer, all the more moving: it is the survival of art in the light of its tomb.

Antoine Thirion