Opening reception with the artist: Friday, 13 February, 6–8pm.
Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Dove Allouche's first exhibition at our Paris location, and his fourth collaboration with the gallery. Entitled CHNOPS, it brings together Halley_1910May10 (2024–2025), a new photographic series, and Tableau périodique (2024), a portfolio of 96 color photographs.
“The eye, like a strange balloon, heads toward infinity” (Odilon Redon, “To Edgar Poe”)
It is everywhere, wherever you turn. What is mystery? That is what the title of the exhibition says, in its own cryptic way: CHNOPS is the acronym for the six chemical elements that make up living matter, whose combinations are, as one can imagine, infinite. Mystery is matter. Science advances through enigmas.
Dove Allouche does not indulge in enigmas, but strives to make visible imperceptible physical realities, which science also explores. The series brought together in CHNOPS—the images of Halley's Comet and the spectrographs of the chemical elements in Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table—confront us visually with the infinite dimensions of the universe and matter.
Nine black balls of varying sizes seem to emerge into space, our space, falling towards the ground as if subject to the force of gravity. We recognize the characteristic morphology of the “hairy star”: the nucleus, its halo or coma, and its tail of gas and dust. As the title of the series, Halley_1910May10, indicates, it is the same comet that passes before our eyes, captured on the same day but multiplied into a disparate and dynamic sequence of nine figures. It is a musical or film score with a desynchronized rhythm, a ballet of primordial souls. Primordial souls are somewhat what comets are, messengers from the universe. The celestial bodies come from infinitely far away, from the outer reaches of the solar system, and, according to the most recent hypotheses, are composed of molecules dating back to the formation of the universe.
Comets are a fascinating phenomenon with many facets: astrophysical, historical, and cultural. From the perspective of earthlings, comets are mostly ephemeral and unpredictable apparitions: they are visible only when they pass close to Earth during their journey towards the sun. Among the thousands of comets circulating in our galaxy, 1P/Halley (its scientific name) is the best known, thanks to its short periodicity of 76 years—a human lifetime. Its interstellar trajectory traces an ellipse that is the signature of its behavior: it appears, disappears, then returns. This recurrence gives it the special status of companion and witness to human history, as demonstrated through 1P/Halley appearing in Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel fresco, the Bayeux Tapestry, and Albrecht Dürer's Melancholia. Thanks to their recognizable silhouette and behavior, comets have become icons, identified by their various nicknames, such as “hairy stars” or “wandering stars,” that were inspired by their chemistry described by scientific metaphors: hair, halo, sublimation, spatter, and vaporization. They are part of human history and memory. As objects of astronomical observation, they have long been interpreted as prophetic signs, most often of catastrophe or divine vengeance.
It is mainly through visual representations that we know comets. Allouche tackles this icon, as he always does, by taking on the depth of a phenomenon in all its dimensions, in this case physical, cosmic, and imaginary. Photography naturally marked a milestone in cometary history and also influenced human perception of the phenomenon. In this regard, 1910, the year of the eagerly awaited return of 1P/Halley, was an exceptional year in at least two respects: the passage of the comet, clearly visible to the naked eye, was spectacular, and, even more importantly for science and earthlings in general, it was photographed for the first time, making it a global and now historic event.
The artist photographed images of 1P/Halley from 1910, which he cropped and enlarged. The resulting black bulbs challenge our idea of the luminous celestial body. In fact, they are negatives that were selected from the Atlas published by NASA in 1986, during the comet's last passage. The Atlas brings together 1,200 views taken in different observatories on various continents in 1910. The nine Halley_1910May10 photographs are therefore appropriations, reproductions of reproductions of original photographs. The negatives, which allow certain details to be seen more clearly, appear in the Atlas. The negative, completes the comet's passage into darkness. This essential decision, which adopts a scientific logic of astronomical observation, coincides with the phenomenon of the comet's appearance, while emphasizing the chemical revelation phase of photography. It is the dramaturgy of a celestial and photographic apparition, as well as that of an astronomical event, in both senses of the term.
All these operations produce a series of effects that deepen the perception of a phenomenon and its representation. They make an intangible presence tangible, bring a distant body closer, and intensify the aura of the star and its inaugural images by playing on the spectacular quality of appearance.
These sidereal abstractions stimulate the imagination and artistic reminiscences, to say the least. Thus, these falling stars evoke the bodies suspended in the void of an urban setting in Sarah Charlesworth's Stills. Unidentified people, as their captions specify, float in a gray ether and blend into the grain of the enlarged press image, suspended in a space-time that cannot be fathomed other than through art.
Black eclipses the comet, which turns into a black sun: a sign of some real or psychic apocalypse, a meteorite bombardment, or an attack of melancholy. Black is not a monochrome sensation! It is an essential color and a color of health, according to Redon; it condenses or unfolds the potentialities of the visible and the invisible. Allouche's comets are in their own world, rebellious, indifferent, and embodying the pure energy of eternal return. We can see the motif or theme, dear to Redon, of the cyclopean eye, hairy to boot, which reflects an obsession with combining ocular sight and inner vision, exploring one through the other. This is precisely what Allouche does with the mediums of photography and drawing, confronting one with the other, always delving into the substance of the visible—don't his Halley_1910May10 look like charcoal drawings and his spectrographies like abstract paintings? It is from matter that fiction arises, a revealing fiction that intensifies reality: “Matter reveals secrets, it has its genius; it is through matter that the oracle will speak.” (Odilon Redon).
Anne Bonnin
Dove Allouche (born 1972) lives and works in Paris. He has had solo exhibitions at the Bassin de compensation de Fionnay, Le Musée de Bagnes, Switzerland (2023); Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, Paris (2022–2023); Le Grand Trianon, Galerie des Cotelle, Château de Versailles (2019); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2018); Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris (2016); and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013). Recent projects also include a public commission for the library of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris (2021). He was a resident at the Villa Medici, Rome (2011–2012). His work is included in several museum collections including: Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée du Louvre, Paris; Museu d’Art Contemporani Barcelona; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Anne Bonnin is an art critic and curator based in Paris.
A text by the mathematician Javier Fresán also accompanies the exhibition.
For all press inquiries, please contact Mora Basualdo: mora@peterfreemaninc.com.