Cartier, F&D
Françoise and Daniel Cartier
The visual artist couple exhibit as F&D cartier and live in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. Since 1995, they merged their practices –plastic arts & photography- to move toward new approaches.
Examining the indispensable prerequisites for photography - light and photosensitive paper – they mainly opt for “camera-less” combined with “found-objects” concepts.
Chromatic evolutional photo paper series, daylight photograms, extreme solarisations, reinterpretation of original albumen glass plate’s are completed.
Exemplifying their minimalist tendencies, the duo questions everyday life, intimacy, passing of time, the position and role of the artist & of the Image in today’s society.
Present in various foreign and Swiss Museums’ and public collections, they have been awarded prominent distinctions.
Roses
““Roses,” a major body of work that this closely-knit husband-and-wife artist team has been building up since 1998. Their efforts have yielded several series of photograms — images cast by the sunlight alone as it touches the light-sensitive paper surrounding the carefully chosen objets trouvés placed upon it by the artists. Here, photography is reduced to its simplest but most immediate expression. Omitting the camera, the Cartiers achieve a quasi “material” likeness of reality, at the very time when the images and world seeking to apprehend it are dematerializing before our very eyes, evanescing into the virtuality of pixels and bytes — be they mega, giga, or otherwise. … In their photograms — each of which, by the way, is a one-off image — Françoise and Daniel Cartier combine an archaic photographic technique with objects that are part and parcel of contemporary life and modern consumer society: lingerie, doll clothes, handkerchiefs and bathing caps on the one hand and, on the other, skeletal doll outlines, X-rays, strands of hair and self-portraits. The objects are almost all bathed in a rose-pink color of varying degrees of transparency, each boasting an aura of its own. While present in the traces, indeed almost tangible marks, they leave on the paper, they are at the same time absent, slowly fading away in the manner of an afterimage behind closed eyelids.”
Martin Gasser Curator / Swiss Foundation for Photography, 2003
Collections (Selection)
Portland Art Museum, Portland OR
Museum of Fine Arts , Houston TX
Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne Switzerland
Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur Switzerland
Museet for Fotokunst, Odense Denmark
Kunstsammlung F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Basel Switzerland
Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM) Brasil
Publications (Selection)
Wait and See f&d cartier Artist monograph, Ffotogallery Wales Limited, UK 2013 ISBN 978-1-872771-93-9
Roses f&d cartier, Niggli Publishers Sulgen Switzerland 2006 ISBN 978-3-7212-0600-5
EIKON September 4th, 2014
Hochparterre 05/2013 Veni Etiam Bild im Aufbruch, Zurich 2013
Intervalles Revue du Jura bernois et de Bienne Photographie contemporaine, Biel/Bienne, 09.2013
Varlin – Daniel Cartier Stati intermedi nella pittura di Varlin a Bondo, Città di Locarno, 2013 ISBN 978-88-8281-356-7
Eyemazing, Picture Booklets Publishers Amsterdam, Holland February 2007
Spot Magazine, Houston, Fall 2006
Selbstsicht - der Schritt ins Bild, Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie Germany, April 2006
Branding, Centre PasquArt, Bienne and Verlag der Modernen Kunst, Nürnberg 2006
Blue Sky 04/05 Critical Mass, Blue Sky Gallery, Portland USA, 2005
Varlin – Dürrenmatt – Horizontal, Centre Dürrenmatt, Neuchâtel and Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich 2005
Fotophile, nr. 44, New York 2003
Passages, nr. 34, Pro Helvetia 2003
