Art galleries in Perpignan

| Sue Hare

The main city gallery is the Musee D’Art Hyacinthe Rigaud. I saw three exhibitions. Emilie Dumas, “The essential is what is missing”, photographic paintings stripped of detail. I followed this with an exhibition charting the Baroque, Moderne, the Belle Epoque periods in the Perpignan art world and ending with arts in “Perpignan Ajourd’hui” . I reserved an exhibition of work created by Philippe Domergue for my last hour, “a mi-chemin (half way) – immages aux exiles de la terre”. I was lucky, the focus was on photography and exhibited in a very creative way. I’m going to focus on this exhibition here. He had used images taken during the exodus from Francos’s Spain taken by Manuel Moros in 1939 and photos at Camp Kutapalong (Bangladesh) by Vincent Tremeau in 2018. He had reworked images and placed them together in different forms such as wooden fruit boxes, crates, windows, on planks of wood. He created symmetry by focusing on hands, the colour pink, scarves and paperwork. It was very moving. he created mvoement using planks imaginatively. The reasons for fleeing don’t seem to change that much.

Here Dumas is showing how he selects aspects of the photographs for use in his final pieces with view finders .
Escaping from Spain and Franco’s regime in 1939 to France where most of these people would have ended up at Rivesaltes Camp (now a fantastic museum) which was a very harsh place. I like the use of the planks. The photographs were printed in pieces fixed to the planks. It gives movement. There are ways to add to the story a photograph tells.

Leave a comment