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April 5, 2011
Yannick Demmerle is known for making large-scale photographs of forests, lakes and wild-animal cages with an 8x10:
Yannick Demmerle, untitled, from the L'Ours, la mort et les arbres foudroyés exhibition
In his Tasmania work, whilst having a residency at Landscape Art Research Queenstown ( LARQ) He hiked through the wilds for weeks on end, accompanied only by his bulky camera equipment--focusing on the rain forest not the tree. He says that he endeavours to photograph the invisible between the trees, for example, fear.
The Europeans interpret the photographs he creates in the solitude of this remote wilderness as revealing nature much as German landscape painting in the Romantic era did. But while the Romantic painters always included an element of civilisation in their pictures – a ruin, a path, a human being – and depicted their motif from a distance and with a visible horizon, Demmerle closes in on his subjects. There is no horizon and no living creatures to be seen in these images.
This wilderness for the Europeans is merciless, alien and menacing in its sheer unbridled force--his photographs are an expression of the fantastic, irrational and dark.
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