Abstract nominee

"These photographs dwell in the zone between report and fabrication. “I try to create the poem from the evidence,” said playwright Arthur Miller. Garnier’s photographs capture modernist buildings with detail and fidelity, but at the same moment are crafted fictions. They directly record but are vastly recast. They are reliable intelligence and utter illusion. Consequently, they strike an attentive viewer simultaneously as remembrance and as revelation. He has increasingly decided art should not deliver a report on reality but instead look at what is behind reality. The artist seeks to transcend the subject, essentially make subject matter irrelevant. These are reductive works, images that remove the superfluous. What remains, finally, is awareness itself, the bare viewer, a consciousness of visual perception itself. This is an emotional quest, a spiritual journey."

Douglas McCulloh, Senior Curator, UCR

Jacques Garnier is an artist based in Southern California. His work has been featured in over a hundred national and international exhibitions including:
• LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
• Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
• Southeast Museum of Photography, Florida
. Rencontres Internationales de Photographie, France
• CAFA, Chinese Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, China
• Laguna Art Museum
BOOKS
Garnier’s books include: Hymns to the Silence, (2021): A Deconstructed Odyssey, (2018); Revival (2016); Second Chances (2013); The Great Picture: Making the World’s Largest Photograph, (Hudson Hills Press, New York, 2012); On The Beach, Southeast Museum of Photography 2006)
EDGING TOWARDS ABSTRACTION
Photography is an exploration of a vision, an interpretation of what is seen or perhaps unseen. Utilizing a strong graphic sense with liberal use of negative space, Garnier eliminates the clutter and distractions from the image in an effort to see more clearly what is before us. Once the superfluous has been removed, what is left is more open to contemplation – a meditation freed from some of the chaos that surrounds us. This exploration hopes to challenge the viewer into finding a ‘new way of seeing.’