Cedric, mon ami, je vous remerci mille fois pour cette image.
I now know you have been working in the past few weeks that you were absent! We heard little from you after your last series.
This picture is remarkable in it's simplicity and boldness. The inverted building is, unlike the image shown by Cem of the reflections in the canal, is literal upside down, and has little if any alteration by the wayer. It's as if time has stopped and there is no reaction of one element, the building, to the other, the water. Life has, it seems stopped.
In the water we have the detritus of life, a piece of wood that is used for building our homes and then a bottle from liquor used to relieve our anxiety and dampen our inhibitions to disclosure. The grass too is off another time, overgrown and dried out. Finally, the garden, the sky of the picture, is abandoned meaning hope is gone from this place.
I like the coherence of this image. The composition, an inverted V of the building and the rising band of old grass matched by a pyramid of dry grass at the bottom left. The eye is pulled in from the lower left, ascends in the rising strip of water and then after reaching a peak descends to show us the floating bottle and wood.
I stick my neck out to declare this as exceptional. This is not a snapshot to be ignored after an initial glance. It's not a memento. Rather it's an attempt a social commentary. It provides no answers but perhaps reminds us against vanity.
Asher