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For several years, Caroline Corbasson has observed the sky and space through drawing, sculpture and video. Inspired by astronomical instruments, the French visual artist tries to answer universal questions about the place of Man within the universe. She publishes Heat at Area books, a poetic diversion of forgotten space archives, carried out with the photographer Andrea Montano.
In 2019, during a residency at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, Caroline Corbasson discovered a box filled with negatives, prints and observation glass plates dating from the 1950s to the 1990s. Intended to be destroyed or thrown away, they finally fall to him a few months later.
Then begins an experimental work around the printing of these black and white negatives, to which the Corbasson-Montano duo decides to add colors. Evoking the extreme temperatures of space, these vary from red, the color of the coldest planets, often in decline, to blue, which indicates heat at its peak.
The work is built around this thermal and chromatic variation. The archives of the Marseille laboratory unfold over the pages, punctuated with red, pink, purple and then blue sheets. Devoid of captions, these images of constellations or stardust disturb our sense of scale, never leaving us certain of what we are looking at. From scientific documents, they become abstract works of great aesthetic and poetic force.
While working around this series, Caroline Corbasson discovered the practice of silver print, which turned out to resonate with her interest in the cosmos: “What is interesting with the lab is to be in complete darkness. This leads to a real loss of bearings, you have to memorize each gesture andlocation of each item. JI hadrather mystical impression of being in the’space.”
The appearance of the print in the developer echoes the discovery by scientists, then the public, of a new image sent by telescopes from space. This is the effect that these archives certainly produced in their time. Transformed by Caroline Corbasson and Andrea Montano into superb visual poems, they are also a tribute to the pioneering work of Marseille astronomers since the 1960s.
Caroline Corbasson and Andrea Montano – Heat
Published by Area Books, 2023
320 x 240mm
Texte : Luce Lebart
Editorial direction: Bureau Kayser
Graphics: Syndicate
Jeffrey Zucherman Translation
Published thanks to the support of the Antoine de Galbert Foundation
Available in bookstores and online