Marina Gadonneix

Marina Gadonneix is a French photographer and alumna of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles. She is represented by Galerie Christophe Gaillard in Paris.

Fascinated by the other side of images -- or, more precisely, by the hidden mechanism behind them -- she is less concerned with the photograph as representation than with the conditions of its emergence. Gadonneix likes to think of herself as a researcher, and her work is closely bound up with forms of investigation into the world. Her images blur the boundaries between the construction of the imagination and the production of representation. Challenging the possibilities of the gaze, they unfold a poetry of abstraction in the revelation and dialogue between the seen and the unseen. Her art draws on documentation, investigations and research into the mechanisms of producing images, which she photographs in states of anticipation, transition or indeterminacy, thereby opening up ambiguous spaces where perception oscillates between document, physical experience and mental projection.

The dualities of materiality and immateriality, visible and invisible, presence and absence, memory and forgetting, run through her entire body of work. In the Landscapes series, for example, the green and blue screens used in film studios become vast monochromes -- perceptual spaces close to the immateriality of James Turrell's immersive light installations. These recurring dualities are further explored in *After the Image *and then in Phénomènes, a project carried out in collaboration with several scientific laboratories, in which images oscillate between reality and fiction, between what appears and what can hypnotise the gaze and sharpen the imagination, both through a failure to comprehend what is seen and through the conceivability of the unknown. The images become spaces for projection as poetic as the names of the phenomena they re-enact: supernova, dark matter, vortex, hurricane, avalanche, etc.

This focus on the unstable forms of perception has gradually led Gadonneix towards cognitive science, mathematics and contemporary research into artificial intelligence. Building on the concept of latent space --- used to describe the invisible structures organising data in artificial neural networks --- she is collaborating with researcher Victor Rambaud on the project Géométries de l'esprit/Image latente, exploring possible representations of the mind, forms of memory and the geometries that underpin the ways in which we perceive and imagine.

This research has resulted in a body of work in which mathematical models, topological forms, sculptures and counterforms seem to hover between scientific objects and mental landscapes. Gadonneix has taken a particular interest in the models held at the Institut Henri Poincaré , as well as in the geometric forms found in certain areas of neuroscience research. More than mere scientific demonstrations, these images appear to her as intuitive figures in which space bends, flows or loops back on itself, blurring the distinctions between surface and depth, interior and exterior, visible and invisible.

Her research is now leading her towards more spatial and immersive forms in which image and sound might interact within unstable perceptual landscapes. Sound is envisaged here less as an accompaniment than as a mobile, living material, capable of creating space, producing folds and opening up new pathways of perception.