Claire Deweggis

The originality of Claire Deweggis’s work lies in the balance she achieves between the historical technique of photography and the singularity of a highly plastic, contemporary print. She is both a photographer and an artist, rooted in tradition as well as modernity.

Her concern for construction, which plays with architecture and landscape and also makes reference to geometric abstraction, is based on a poetic conviction about the world: the papers she chooses are always fragile and extremely delicate (western, washis, gold leaf, etc.).

A fair and demanding work, whose magnetism cannot be fully explained, and for good reason: her works contain the silence and mystery of dream visions, which are always secrets.

Claire Deweggis has worked in a number of areas, including writing, nature and painting, but she has finally brought them all together in the alternative form that she has been practising since she was a teenager: photography with its pictorialist echoes.

Her shots, from the tiniest pollen to mountain ranges, or her processes using film and paper as transparent, aerial and sonorous membranes, allude more to the senses and perception than to rationalising calculations. She fashions an instinctive, fibrous, silky or crumpled aesthetic in a meditative gesture.

Using cyanotype, platinum, palladium, pigments, etching and gold leaf, she brings a sense of permanence and timelessness to her work.

In her Venetian work, Claire Deweggis reveals the intimate link between the city and its trees. Venice, a lacustrian city where nature is permanent in the anti-nature. Once the human is out of the way, we realise that the city is the scene of long-standing love affairs, where tree and stone live together, struggle together. Her images have a hypnotic effect of slowness.

Her landscape photographic compositions express both lightness and gravity, images in which man is absent, an imago dominated by density and visual abundance.

In Claire Deweggis’s work, the plant form unfolds in an attempt to dialogue with the thickness of time, in a range of light and shadow that recreates a sensitive, sensual and dreamlike space.