Charles-Frédérick Ouellet
in Chandler

EXHIBIT

THE STATE OF PLACES

Parc du Souvenir road and Circuit des bâtisseurs bridge | Chandler
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Charles-Frédérick Ouellet, Québec City, Québec | charlesouellet.ca | kahemimages.com

Although basically documentary in style, Charles-Frédérick Ouellet’s approach is nevertheless not rooted in a single school of thought.

A world imagined, yet photographed all the same. Between reality and fantasy, Charles-Frédérick Ouellet’s quest is centered on a desire to understand societies. His photographic work is the result of an alliance between a documentary approach and an artistic practice closer to an author’s essay. Always with the idea of building a bridge between present and past – and aware that, by definition, photography is subject to capturing “snatches of reality,” that it cannot exist otherwise than in the form of documents that make the past, therefore time, well up – that process pushes the photographer to produce images that reveal, like a palimpsest, a “second degree”; poetic images, detached from any purely descriptive intention, attempting to testify to the presence of places that bear old marks, even invisible ones; to suggest them.

Charles-Frédérick Ouellet’s work has been exhibited in several places in Québec, including VU, Regart and Espace F, as well as in Scotland and France. The artist is represented by the gallery Lacerte art contemporain.

He lives and works in Quebec City, and is a member of the collective KAHEM.

EXHIBIT AT RENCONTRES

THE STATE OF PLACES

“I’m coming to a point in time where what especially interests me in photography is exploring an even more intimate facet of the documentary form. My intention is to move away from ‘witness photography,’ allowing myself, beyond the mere necessity of providing accounts of experiences, to get closer and closer to my desires, or to what I feel, and eliminate all barriers that might get in the way of my subject and me. So, with the idea of building a bridge between present and past – and aware that, by definition, photography is subject to capturing “snatches of reality,” that it cannot exist otherwise than in the form of documents that make the past, therefore time, well up – I am induced by that process to produce images that reveal, like a palimpsest, a ‘second degree’; poetic images, detached from any purely descriptive intention, attempting to testify to the presence of places that bear marks, even invisible ones; to suggest them.”

Charles-Frédérick Ouellet