In 2024, Galerie Esther Woerdehoff presents So Far So Close, a solo show bringing together three series that question our relationship to boundaries. Through images that progressively register the fading of figuration in his work, Julien Mignot seriously raises the question of what is at play at the very edge of the real world. He uses that world as raw material, without betraying photography by reducing it to mere technique: abstraction, here, emerges from the real rather than from the medium.

Three series are presented. The first, Before The Night Is Over, compiles situations, landscapes, and nudes that appear to be freed from their anchoring in reality. Outlines vanish in a pictorial sfumato accentuated by the Fresson process; skin blends into the surroundings; mountains dissolve in weightlessness; the Brooklyn Bridge becomes a painting. These are the first signs of a drift toward a kind of photography that will henceforth break away from figuration.

“Trains across the plain.” Julien Mignot’s images evoke something of these words sung by Alain Bashung, like a point of view: as if the world were seized in a state of motion, allowing a light to pass through—a light of the instant already crossed, already gone, of which only the memory remains. Souviens-toi de m’oublier? These photos seem, as the saying goes, to whisper. They are, in fact, the fruit of moments of forgetting, moments that exist between the shots of commissioned or professional work. They are interstices, loosened spaces that let a fragment of life filter through at the moment when there is nothing to do but cross a field, traverse a plain, remember to forget—yet keep in mind the material of the glimmer, through trees, bodies, and passing desires.

Joseph Ghosn