"Le Marais d’Arles"

The marshes of Arles

gelatin silver print

signed, titled, dated and numbered (ink), artist stamp and "ref.3149" on verso

In the swamps of Arles stretches out the land of the beyond. It is this Secret Camargue that the artist reveals to us through a light that he makes his own. Lucien Clergue practises reading in these landscapes the signs that make up the rice paddies, swamp seaweed, triumphant maize leaves, vines flooded in winter or the sleeping pond whose somewhat mystic nature he knows how to enumerate. In a sky washed by the wind, the process of organic life is born in every instant and organises itself in a winegrower’s delirium. Between the wanderings of the Rhone we find the Vaccares, the Delta and its silt, the beauty of the reeds, the expanses of salt, the violence of the cracked earth — generous nature on which the artist feeds, out of sight of the common eye. True poetry in its deepest sense is here installed.
(Atelier Lucien Clergue)