Philippe Gronon
Born in 1964 (FR).
Lives and works in Malakoff.
Since the late 1980s, Philippe Gronon has developed a photographic practice based on a deliberately elementary
approach to the medium, treating photography as a process for recording reality.
This position takes the form of a rigorous production protocol that excludes any intervention on the subject. Nearly all of the objects he photographs—electrical panels, safes, writing desks, lithographic stones, the reverse sides of paintings—or, more recently, digitizes and scans—work surfaces, stretcher frames, photographic trays, and press frames—are captured frontally, at a 1:1 scale. Cut out from their surroundings, they are isolated from any spatial or temporal context, giving rise to a new formal intensity.
Both subjects and photographic objects, perfectly reproduced without becoming fetishes or artifacts, these motifs elude simple imagery. Their flatness, frontal presentation, and mode of display implicitly refer to the history of painting, lending each photograph a pictorial quality. Beneath the apparent neutrality of the frontal view unfolds a renewed attentiveness to the objects that surround us, which, once stripped of their function, acquire a singular presence and an unprecedented auratic dimension.
His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in France and internationally, notably at the Frac des Pays de la Loire (2001); MAMCO, Geneva (2010); the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes (2010); the Villa Medici, Rome (2010);
the Musée Picasso–Paris (2016); and the Musée de La Chaux-de-Fonds (2021–2022).
His work is represented in numerous public collections, including those of the Centre Pompidou; the Musée du Louvre; MAC VAL, Ivry-sur-Seine; MAMCO, Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Genève; MAMAC, Nice;
and the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland.