Charles-Frédérick Ouellet
in Petite-Vallée
EXHIBIT
LE NAUFRAGE (THE SHIPWRECK)
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
LE NAUFRAGE (THE SHIPWRECK)
Over the past few years, Charles-Frédérick Ouellet has been investigating the particular energy surrounding communities that have settled along the sea. His photographic series examine the sea as an active element in the way people live along the shore, suggesting that its constant motion and dazzling power leave marks on people and places alike.
In Le Naufrage, Ouellet recounts the everyday life of men working at sea along the coast of the St. Lawrence River. These photographs address the fragile balance that exists in the relationship between people and their environment. The series of images moves from raw depictions to dreamlike impressions, seeking situations in which the human and nature haunt one another.