Lisbon Gallery, R. de Dona Estefânia 123A, 1000-153 Lisbon. Open 9:30 am – 6 pm.
I took my first photograph so long ago that I can say photography has almost always been part of my life. It is a constant exercise, a daily training of the eye and the mind, an opening onto the world around us. Like a musician practising scales, you have to keep practising: looking at the light, observing what surrounds you, even without a camera, and asking yourself how to render what you see and how to share what you love.
I have lived in Lisbon since 2004, and the city is so unique that every walk is a discovery. I love its changing light, so vivid in winter under skies often heavy with clouds. I love the contrast it makes with the city's white stone, the calçada and the Tagus. I love its viewpoints, its steep streets, its staircases. Always searching for a new angle, a curve, a line.
Geometry and composition have always been central to my images. Is it the mark of a certain classical culture, in painting as well as in photography, or the search for a balance between curved and straight lines, between light and shadow? Probably both.
My images are certainly less crowded than the city has become… I am looking neither for emptiness nor necessarily for a human presence. Above all, as I walk, I look for an emotion that I try to capture so that I can share it. Sometimes the landscape is enough on its own; sometimes a human presence adds a dimension, but it is not always necessary.
The selection of images I am presenting today brings together themes that are dear to me, and gives you a glimpse of what I love and what I see…
Olivier Perrin
Lisbon Gallery, once a travelling gallery in partnership with the Lusitano Clube, is now also a shop, and on 6 December it opens a new photography exhibition dedicated to Lisbon. French photographer Olivier Perrin was chosen for the first exhibition in Lisbon Gallery's new space on Rua Dona Estefânia, in the former Leituria bookshop. Lisboa – Pelas curvas da cidade is the name of the exhibition: forty black-and-white images of the city.
Olivier Perrin's work is, quite deliberately, purely photographic. It relies on architecture – and on the crossing of its guiding lines – to structure its own pictorial language of light and shadow. The essence of the work "lives" in that structure and draws all its contemporary meaning from it, without erasing earlier references. The result is a series of sculpted constructions, scattered with visible and invisible elements, that reach far beyond the obvious.
We know that Lisbon can surprise us, yet how many of us, crossing it every day, take it for granted in the closed circle of our routines and shared memories? The unspoken opens up to us the hidden hill of a Lisbon we thought we knew, which the artist invites us to revisit through his spatial vision, both from the outside and from within.
The images – of Lisbon, Ericeira, Vila Franca de Xira or Sesimbra – are sometimes inhabited only by the forms born of this dialogue of contrasts and organic shapes: the flat expanse of the Tagus, the sculptural rhythm of architectural structures (some, especially the staircases, recall Cartier-Bresson), or the free movement of the Atlantic and the Tagus, set in stone in the calçada we walk on without noticing.
The cinematic, timeless symmetry of the composition, and the visual tension between the point where the image begins and its near horizon, fully express this interplay, in which the unspoken (or the invisible…) conveys the true depth of the artist's gaze. The structure in the foreground – a stable, still vantage point from which we see the sea and the lighthouse, an ode to the restless reach of the ocean – is in the end no more than a vessel between two shores, drifting through that uncertain, living mass of water which both separates and unites them.
Joshua Benoliel, one of the greatest Portuguese photographers of the early twentieth century, recorded for posterity the stories that crossed History – humanist, intimate accounts of the people and places of his time. Olivier Perrin, in turn, crosses other people, other spaces, other stories, born of his – of our – time: a world in which intimacy, like humanity, drifts in constant change, living more and more in the instant of a glance, in light shining through the darkness of space, in the embrace of pictorial duality (light/dark… black/white…).
That is where the new "Light" of a Lisbon we believed was ours resides. Through Olivier Perrin's work it reveals itself, surprisingly, as belonging to the world, reframing past cosmopolitanisms through a contemporary eye, and revealing "shadow" as the complement to Lisbon's iconic "Light". A French artist whose gaze embraces the Portuguese sea.
"(…) Once more I see you – Lisbon and the Tagus and all –, (…)"
From the poem Lisbon Revisited (1926), in "Poemas", Álvaro de Campos (heteronym of Fernando Pessoa).
Fernando Ribeiro
Curator, ALFA – Association Luso-Française d'Art
I was almost 10 when you started teaching me photography. At the very beginning, you lent me a small camera and we walked the streets of Lisbon looking for a beautiful viewpoint, a moment to capture. Back home, you would switch on your computer and we would sort through the shots together. I can still see you teaching me that the subject of a photo should never be right in the centre. You showed me how to straighten a picture, how to turn it into black and white, how to add a frame… I followed you everywhere, bag over my shoulder and camera in hand, trying to take photos like yours, which I admired, while doing them differently, my own way.
As for this photo, I remember perfectly that when you started shooting in that shopping centre, I wondered why. I was tired, I wanted to go home, and you were determined to wait for the right moment, with just the right number of people on the walkway.
I learned two important things that day: waiting for the right moment can be worth it, and above all, beauty can be found anywhere, even in a shopping centre.
Camille Perrin
The subject is undefined; the central, (almost) symmetrical perspective takes over. The ordered progression of the surface. The regular patterns of the edge; the restless water close by, bounded by the line of pillars; the plane of distant stillness beyond. The pillars frame, delimit, order and define the space of reference, marking both the fleeting nature of the moment and the fundamental separation between what is defined and what is hazy. The sailboat, tiny, at first hidden by the mist, is the projection, the reflection of an essential form and of its movement across the soft surface. The story of a fragment of life, whose meaning unfolds gradually. A story of composition and change. Of mystery and revelation. Of reality, dream and hallucination. A "moment of Being".
Jorge Portugal
It is a bridge without end and without origin, one end lost in the mist. Far away, as if emerging from a cloud, appears the silhouette of Christ the Redeemer. Are we in Lisbon, San Francisco or Rio de Janeiro? What matters most, no doubt, is to let ourselves be carried far away, across the Atlantic and further still, to the edges of our imagination. For Olivier Perrin's photographs invite us to look at a reality that only appears to be clear. Straight lines, geometric shapes, graphic curves: his eye highlights and recomposes stylised spaces in which human presence is deliberately rare. But if the photographer sharpens edges and defines lines, isn't it to encourage us to trace our own paths beneath his images, and to sense, beyond the first glance, the hazier impressions that stir within us? Lisbon, a city of departure as much as of returning to oneself…
Kidi Bebey, writerAgenda Cultural Lisboa
"Olivier Perrin, a French artist, was the photographer chosen for the first exhibition in Lisbon Gallery's new space. The gallery, which since the 1990s has gathered and produced an unofficial iconography of Lisbon, with images by Varda, Castello-Lopes and Boubat among others, is devoted exclusively to the city. Olivier Perrin's exhibition brings together 40 black-and-white images of stairs, windows, bridges, benches and calçada, revealing an unseen Lisbon, far from the crowds pouring out of the metro or the tour groups filling the Baixa."Agenda Cultural Lisboa
https://www.agendalx.pt/events/event/olivier-perrin/
Time Out
"Lisbon Gallery used to travel, but it has now settled in Estefânia. In this photography shop and gallery, which invites you to (re)discover the beauty of the city through quality work at affordable prices, Lisbon-based French photographer Olivier Perrin was chosen for the first exhibition: a Lisbon made of lines, curves, angles and volumes."Time Out
https://www.timeout.pt/lisboa/pt/arte/lisboa-pelas-curvas-da-cidade
Lisbonne Affinités
"This space, both shop and classic gallery, opens to the public to reveal the singular eye of photographers in love with the city. Because this is about love. The first exhibition devoted to the capital at Lisbon Gallery bears the evocative name Lisboa – Pelas curvas da cidade ('Lisbon – Through the curves of the city'). It is by Olivier Perrin: black-and-white portraits of a photogenic city that loves to be caressed by the lens of its admirers. Here everything is suggestion, everything is illusion, which is why these urban landscapes, at once so familiar and so new, are so captivating. Windows, flights of steps, glimpses of the river: a city of shifting geometry, of curves and sharp angles. The photographer also seeks to capture Lisbon's incomparable light."Lisbonne Affinités
http://www.xn--lisbonne-affinits-qtb.com/lisbon-gallery-photographies-de-lisbonne/
Público – 17 February 2020
"From Cais das Colunas to the curves of MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology – by way of the boats on the Tagus, Lisbon is seen through the eyes of a French photographer captivated by 'the characteristic light and the tangle of old and modern buildings' of a city 'shaped by the relationship between natural space (the hills, the river) and architecture' – the city he chose to live in. His name is Olivier Perrin, and the 40 black-and-white images on show are his."