Philippe MAUPETIT - Douglas GORSLINE
SEQUENCES AND MOVEMENTS
" Time, Space, Light"

For our ninth season (2002), the museum welcomed a presentation of photographs by Phillip Maupetit : "themovingbody" placing it in the framework of the permanent collection of works by Douglas Gorsline. In order to create this exhibition Phillip Maupetit closed himself up for five years in darkened theatres abandoning himself to the activity (mainly dance) taking place in front of his eyes. Minutes, hours, days, years were passed observing these ‘inhabited’ bodies often allowing him to discover an intimate secret which he would witness in the act of photographing it. The photograph would be his testimony..

Gorsline with his power of observation knew how to seize the same intimate secrets in the changing expressions of his sitters and to portray these in a sequence of images. In Maupetit’s photographs black opposes white, movement the inanimate; Gorsline's drawings reflect the same contrasts. Meanwhile one finds the same incisive sense of seeing in his paintings as that of the photographer in his photographs.

Maupetit photographs groups of dancers in movement – jumping, turning, gesticulating – in order to underline the dynamics of this art; Gorsline fragments the bodies of musicians, basket ball players, and other sportsmen and women in action to give us the same effect. Each artist, using his own means, has been able to make his subjects move around in space, in time and in light. Whatever their subject, the theme is movement

Maupetit captures sequences in a unique instant, Gorsline cuts instants into sequences and sequences into instants. Each of them depicts chosen moments of suspended time. Movement is the key word that connects them and which makes the art of each illuminate that of the other.

As a final but primary parallel it should be noted that each artist was inspired by the chronophotography of Étienne Jules Marey