Galerie Anne-Laure Buffard
Ilanit Illouz , France
"Sel noir"
Ilanit Illouz, Pampa XIII Série : Les dolines (2016-2023) Tirage fossilisé au sel, 20 cm x 30 cm, 2023, Œuvre unique
The Anne-Laure Buffard Gallery is delighted to present “Sel noir,” a solo exhibition by the French artist Ilanit Illouz, renowned for her experimental photographic practice. Ilanit Illouz notably received the Prix du Public Découverte Louis Roederer for her series “Dolines” at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2020. Her works were recently featured at the 2023 edition of Paris Photo, in a Solo Show included in the “Elles x Paris Photo” curated by Fiona Rogers from the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, who will also contribute an essay on Ilanit Illouz’s work for the exhibition.
Ilanit Illouz’s approach is rooted in the life forms that occupy territories. By exploring a place, Ilanit Illouz appropriates it and offers a reading that is both personal and oriented towards historical, political, and societal issues, echoing her own family history marked by displacements and identity questions. Her work leads her to explore the Judean Desert and more recently the Mediterranean coast, spaces she traverses on foot, using her camera as well as her hands to gather fragments of matter – true poetic images – directly from the ground.
The exhibition presents a dialogue between the series “Dolines” – a study of the Wadi Qelt valley, a dried-up lake whose landscapes eroded by salt resemble a lunar territory – and the series “Falling Flowers,” the artist’s latest project focusing on the Mediterranean basin and particularly the volcanic landscapes of Etna, Vulcano, and Stromboli, witnesses to the collective history of this region marked by migration, displacement, and territorial conflicts. Offering a poetic and sensitive inventory of landscapes for these two spaces, Ilanit Illouz photographs the locations and collects, among other natural elements, salt, which she then uses in her process of crystallizing photographic prints.
Ilanit Illouz’s artistic approach thus questions the mineral, the inertia of a movement frozen in the soil, but also our relationship to vegetation, reflecting humanity’s relationship to land and life. At the intersection of documentary and artistic approaches, Ilanit Illouz offers through her works – both photographic and plastic – an engaged and poetic vision of the sites, in rhythm with her walks that unveil a relationship to space and matter that is both personal and collective.
Solo show of Ilanit Illouz
From May 14th to June 15th, 2024
The gallery
The Anne-Laure Buffard Gallery belongs to the new generation of Parisian contemporary art galleries that are seizing new spaces to prioritize a close relationship with their artists and collectors.
Originally located in an apartment on Place de la Bourse, the Anne-Laure Buffard Gallery offers exhibitions in an intimate setting conducive to discussion and exchanges, as well as off-site projects, taking advantage of invitations to invest in the extraordinary architectures of partner locations (La Caserne - Paris 10th, the private mansion at 35/37 in the Marais).
After eighteen months of existence as a semi-nomadic structure, the Anne-Laure Buffard Gallery inaugurated a public space in the Marais, at 6 rue Chapon, in December 2023, in addition to its showroom on Place de la Bourse. This new location, close to the Centre Pompidou and at the heart of the collective dynamics of galleries in the neighborhood, allows it to increase the visibility of the projects it supports and to offer a permanent space for exhibitions and meetings.
In a forward-thinking approach, the Anne-Laure Buffard Gallery offers tailored support to a select group of artists with diverse practices - painting, sculpture, photography, poetry, video, installation, and digital art - acknowledging the porous nature of approaches and mediums in contemporary art.
Gallery artists
Antoine Ronin, Elie Bouisson, Yoshimi Futamura, Ilanit Illouz, Nhu Xuan Hua, Park Chae Biole, Park Chae Dalle, Pauline-Rose Dumas, Pierre-Élie de Pibrac
Galerie sélectionnée par Laurence Maynier et Matthieu Lelièvre
