Animato

Animato - Ebb and flow Take a seat on the terrace of a café and watch the constant flow of passers-by, the hundreds and thousands of fellow human beings going back and forth, each at their own pace, pursuing their ever accelerating daily life. Let your eyes follow one in particular. Just a few seconds will pass from when the person enters your field of vision then turns the street corner. At that point the image of the person will already appear blurred to you and the recollection will inevitably dim. Who but the photographer, with his watchful eyes, attentive to the slightest detail, postures, gestures, the thousands of ways of dressing, hesitations and haste, could catch the feverishness of these minute particles of lives, these lives about which you will never know anything? Marc Krüger, through patience, long exposures, without manipulating images, by simply occasionally modifying contrasts and luminosities, manages to capture the intensity of these urban places, backdrops to the incessant wanderings of human beings. There emerges in his work the delightful combination of reality and movement. A frozen, practically unchangeable world in the background and, at the heart of this architecture, the constantly repeated coming and going of a crowd, a fascinating saraband relating the passing of time. Silhouettes that leave misty traces, meeting, merging and fleeing out of the image in a dance that appears to have been invented for the sole pleasure of the eyes. A latent melancholy can be felt at the heart of the work of this virtuoso photographer, where the ebb and flow of City life is unveiled. The passing of time is, of course, implicit. But the work also highlights the impermanency of our existence, anonymous lives eager to devour the world and which, finally, are digested by it. There remains, here and there, a recollection as vague and as elusive as that of the insubstantial traces that the artist captures on the film. The image of a world that vanishes as soon as it is invented, but which is constantly regenerated. It recalls Baudelaire: the image of a past world, as if veiled by tears of nostalgia. Let memory do its slow work, let what is latent and imaginary emerge ….. Marc Krüger, like a subtle painter, illustrates in each image the words of the poet, even in his landscapes – great trees as if buffeted by the wind of time – and in his photograph the movement becomes, for me, as much a flow of life as the energy of despair … Ludovic Duhamel (Miroir de l'Art)