Hélène Binet: Transitions

Characterised by extreme synthesis, Hélène Binet’s photographic narration of architecture features in a new exhibition at the SOLO Galerie in Paris.

Photography plays an important role in the training of an architect because it is also thanks to these passive explorations that one makes contact, visual not physical, with the architectural object. The photographer therefore assumes a great responsibility in passing on their own experience of architecture, way of seeing space. In fact, photography is not simply about documenting space but also implies the ability to interpret its complexity: images are a tool for critical analysis.

Hélène Binet, <i>Sergio Musmeci: Un ponte sul Basento – Potenza, Italia 1968</i>. Photo Hélène Binet, 2015. © Hélène Binet & Solo Galerie — **Top**: View of the exhibition Hélène Binet – Transitions at the Solo Galerie in Paris. Photo Giaime Meloni. **Above**: Hélène Binet, *Sergio Musmeci: Un ponte sul Basento – Potenza, Italy 1968*. Photo Hélène Binet, 2015. © Hélène Binet & Solo Galerie

For thirty years, Hélène Binet has been developing a photographic narrative of architecture characterised by its extreme synthesis, able to convey a sensorial experience on the basis of changes of light on architecture. However trivial it may seem, light and shade are the tools that are paramount to her work. In the images by the Swiss photographer it is rare to see a building in its wholeness, her intention is that of framing, selecting a part of the whole to highlight the texture, conveying something of the three-dimensionality of the works through the image.

<b>A sinistra</b>Hélène Binet, Sergio Musmeci: Un ponte sul Basento – Potenza, Italia 1968. Photo Hélène Binet, 2015. © Hélène Binet & Solo Galerie. <b>A destra</b>: Hélène Binet, <i>Daniel Liebeskind: The Jewish Museum working site – Berlino 1968</i>. Photo Hélène Binet, 1996. © Hélène Binet & Solo Galerie — **Left**: Hélène Binet, *Sergio Musmeci: Un ponte sul Basento – Potenza, Italy 1968*. Photo Hélène Binet, 2015. © Hélène Binet & Solo Galerie. **Right**: Hélène Binet, *Daniel Liebeskind: The Jewish Museum working site – Berlin 1968*. Photo Hélène Binet, 1996. © Hélène Binet & Solo Galerie

Her photographs are distinguished by the capacity to construct an intimate relationship with the work of architecture. Hers is a reflexive practice that interrogates the direct relationship between the photographer and the object. This photographic action is conceived as a performance. Hélène Binet remains faithful to a traditional practice of the analogue photography using a view camera and photosensitive plates (almost always in black and white). It is a bulky and heavy instrument that allows few hesitations and distractions in the creation of a relationship with architecture. The act of photographing carried out via a ritual made of precise gestures is interpreted as a temporal process of transition: in the very moment in which it is photographed, the architecture is transformed into ruins.

Hélène Binet, <i>Sverre Fehn: Hedmark Museum, Hamar, Norvegia, 1973</i>. Photo Hélène Binet, 2009. © Hélène Binet & Solo Galerie — Hélène Binet, *Sverre Fehn: Hedmark Museum, Hamar, Norway, 1973*. Photo Hélène Binet, 2009. © Hélène Binet & Solo Galerie

This is one of the possible ways of interpreting the exhibition “Transitions” at the SOLO Galerie in Paris. The exhibition is organised in four rooms, each of which houses a selection of images of four different projects chosen by the artist. The viewer is greeted by a triptych depicting the bridge on the Basento by Sergio Musmeci, the choice of this architectural object seems almost to want to suggest that the transition is above all a corporeal action in the landscape from one point to another.

The second room houses a journey to the building site of the Jewish Museum by Daniel Libeskind in which the building is devoid of any ornament, no doors, no floors: everything becomes pure and brutal material under the play of lights that construct the space. It raises the question as to whether the explicit transition in the title is a desire to give form to the sense of becoming in the construction process.

Hélène Binet, <i>Sigurd Lewerentz: Makuskyrkan, Saint Mark’s church, Björkhagen, Svezia, 1960</i>. Photo Photo Hélène Binet, 1989. © Hélène Binet & Solo Galerie — Hélène Binet, *Sigurd Lewerentz: Makuskyrkan, Saint Mark’s church, Björkhagen, Sweden, 1960*. Photo Photo Hélène Binet, 1989. © Hélène Binet & Solo Galerie

Continuing around the exhibition, the third room houses photographs made in 1989 at Saint Mark’s Church by Sigurd Lewerentz. The attention of her gaze is concentrated on the skin of the building and its relationship with the external environment. Everything plays on the grouping of eight square images where the modular grid of the bricks is interrupted by the presence of a number of enigmatic objects, candelabras, that like the shadows and the trees participate in the construction of a decidedly Nordic and mysterious atmosphere around the building. Finally, the last images depict a number of fragments of the Hedmark Museum built by Sverre Fehn in 1973 at Hamar in Norway. These images notionally refer back to Musemeci’s bridge, suggesting to the viewer the point of arrival of the architectural promenade carried out through the various works.