Sabine Jaccard's art critic

 

by Cookie Allez (author)

 

for the exhibition displayed in DC, in June 2016

 

WATER AND DREAMS

 

Sabine’s eye transforms and transcends. This is a constant feature of her photos, deliberately inscribed in black and white for years.

Projected onto the ordinary spectacle of life, her imagination performs a miraculous diffraction of reality which projects us beyond what our eyes can see.

Sabine transforms water into fire, into exuberant jungles, into phantasmagorical shapes, or into comets’ tails…leaving us free to interpret what we see. Children metamorphose into pure joy in those chosen scenes and in those moments stolen to time, then fixed for ever in this new truth. They are a dance; they are a game; they are a scream; they are childhood. They are simply themselves in the superlative.

When she slips into a crowd with her camera, or sneaks discreetly right into life’s games, Sabine immerses herself body and soul in photography. When you follow her, you realize how acute her eyes are and how they show an extreme tension, even an anticipating power; this incites you to remain silent. That is why one can feel in her photos the will and strength to see clearly through the surface of the mirror that reality holds up to us. As well as her ability to look on the world with benevolence.

It is difficult to write about her photos without speaking about Shakespeare, who has nourished her with his plays, to such an extent that she borrows from his comedy “As you like it” the title of one of her most recent exhibitions: “All the world’s a stage”.

The sets, like the roles, are infinite, but “what the photographer reproduces infinitely takes place only once”, as the French art historian Roland Barthes very justly observed. Still, the artist must be there, immobilized by the dazzling site and yet able to recreate it in a different dimension.

There is magic to Sabine’s art. At the end of those little miracles, it is for the spectator’s eye to play the final act!