Martine Fougeron: Summer Time
Curated by Laurent Puech
June 23 - September 17, 2023
Exhibition of 17 large images ( 29 x 43 inches) as well as a 30” film Summertime à Esparon directed by Martine Fougeron

From the series “Nicolas & Adrien”

30” Film projected during the exhibition on a large screen: Summertime à Esparon

An intimately epic family story starting in the 50s in a deserted hamlet in France. The Director's relatives' photographs and 16mm films are presented along with her own photographic work and narration around the summertime theme.

Art Institute of Le Chateau d’Assas

Artist’s Statement in Catalogue

And Esparon becomes a Rock in the Imaginary

My idea for this Summer Time exhibition is to share a family novel in pictures.
Perhaps a small remanence of the three dramaturgical units of Ancient Greece. She populated my captive imagination during my childhood.
Everything takes place during a single season: summer.
Everything is concentrated around a single place: the hamlet of Esparon in the Cévennes.
Everything is focused on the same age: youth.
But this summertime unfolds, with strength and grace, from the 1950s to the present day.

The Summer Time exhibition at the Chateau d'Assas, in a beautiful 18th-century family residence, lends itself perfectly to this. The three showrooms, with beautiful proportions, are very luminous. The central room was a "salon de compagnie"- -literally a living room where you are in good company-, and the two other rooms were bedrooms. Places usually reserved for friends and family.
A perfect setting to exhibit this family novel through four generations.

In the former salon de compagnie and the first bedroom, I present 17 large-format photographs from my intimate Nicolas & Adrien series. This series explores the landscape of adolescence. I call it a liminal state, the passage between childhood and adulthood, between feminine and masculine, between innocence and a budding identity. I photograph "non-event" scenes of everyday life that become events." I like to depict my two sons eating, sleeping, bathing, relaxing and interacting with friends.
You will be in the company of my two sons and their tribe of friends during the Summer Holidays.

The third room-bedroom-is dedicated to the screening of the film Summertime à Esparon. I was so impressed by the cinematography of the family archive, of my grandfather Georges and my father Pierre, that I decided to make this film, within the framework of this exhibition. I'm influenced by film conventions, especially the expressive effects of set lighting. I am also inspired by Dutch painting, in particular Vermeer's mysterious domestic portraits. It moves me.
You will find this theatrical dramaturgy and this gentle domesticity in the cinematography of the family archive.
You will be in an intimate room, in the dark, to vibrate for 30 minutes with 70 years of history in images with 6 hands. An uninterrupted dialogue.

The Summer Time exhibition is for me a transmission that is anchored in an intimate genealogy.
My inspiration is to tell the story from my point of view of a granddaughter, a daughter as well as a mother.

Esparon is the mountain circus which rises like an amphitheater where characters and landscapes are staged.
I look for mysterious tensions between the spontaneous and the mise-en-scène.
Where the imagination lights up.

Martine Fougeron
Esparon, June 4, 2023

More information:
Invitation