Sufficiently Near

    “Photography could have taken this form. Starting from rare clues, I experimented with Thermography, that forgotten process which makes it possible to visualize the heat emitted by objects. The German physicist Ludwig Moser invented it in the 1840s. "When two objects are sufficiently near, they reflect their own images onto each other," he observed. And what appeared before my eyes was a blazing, colorful image.” — Hanako Murakami


    With her new exhibition Sufficiently Near, Hanako Murakami (born in 1984 in Tokyo, lives in Paris) continues her exploration of the forms that photography could have taken. In her previous exhibition Past Future, organized in the same Odéon gallery in 2022, the artist presented Field of Possibilities (2022), a sculptural work composed of various processes across different media. For this new exhibition, she dedicates her focus exclusively to the thermography process, with each piece titled Possibility (Thermography). "By exploring the ancient processes of photography, I discover what photography could have been — possible scenarios that have not been exploited," Murakami wrote. Thermography, a reproduction technique using heat instead of light, was developed in 1842 by Ludwig Moser (1805–1880) but was overshadowed by the official announcement of the daguerreotype in 1839. For Hanako Murakami, thermography represents one of the unexploited possibilities in the history of photography.

    Sufficiently Near concludes Avant-Gardens, a cycle of exhibitions presented at the gallery, all emanating from artists’ gardens. The vegetal motifs fixed on copper plates or glass are elements from Murakami’s own garden in the French region of Perche, featuring plants such as Geranium robertianum, chervil, and Jacaranda. For Murakami, gathering and reproducing these plants is part of her archaeology of photography, blending research, concepts, and poetry.

    The exhibition also offers a delightful surprise: some of the plants — plumeria, California poppy, rose geranium, and German hedge nettle, among others — come from the gardens of two other artists: Daniel Blaufuks' garden near Lisbon and David Horvitz's garden in Los Angeles. These gardens form the other parts of the Avant-Gardens cycle. While the gardens of Blaufuks, Horvitz, and Murakami are geographically distant, the plants exchanged between the artists create a shared community of ideas and intentions. In letters sent to French public institutions, to which he has also offered plants, David Horvitz evoked "networks of friendship through gift economies.”

— Jean-Kenta Gauthier, October 2024



    Hanako Murakami, Sufficiently Near is the third and last part of Avant-Gardens, a season of gallery exhibitions emanating from artists' gardens, in homage to Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006), a poet and conceptual artist who liked to define himself as an “avant-gardener.”




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Avant-Gardens
September 7 - December 21
Jean-Kenta Gauthier Odéon & Vaugirard

Part 1: David Horvitz, Avenues All Lined With Trees
September 7 - October 19
JKG Odéon & Vaugirard

Part 2: Daniel Blaufuks, Jardim Cinema
October 26 - December 21
JKG Vaugirard

Part 3: Hanako Murakami, Sufficiently Near
October 30 - December 21
JKG Odéon