Livret Esser

Exhibition Statement
Galerie RX proposes a solo show of Franco-German photographer Elger Esser, featuring selections from two
recent photo series taken in Israel and Egypt in dialogue with one another. These two nations are rendered by Esser at
once alike and distinct in their topographies, as their shared aesthetic beauty occludes their disparate religious, political, and
artistic histories. By bringing these works together in our space at Expo Chicago, Galerie RX will present viewers with an
opportunity to consider and imagine landscapes normally obscured by complex and divisive narratives.
This presentation will feature photographs of landscapes in Egypt and Israel, taken during the artist’s travels there in 2011
and 2015, respectively. Elger titled a publication of these images Morgenland (“Morning Land”), a long obsolete term
which was replaced by label “Orient”, and then again by “Middle East”. His chosen term evokes many of the Western
mythologies about this region as the promised land, the holy land, and a site of romanticized encounters with the East,
longed for by the painters, writers, and photographers of the nineteenth century. Esser was drawn “towards morning”
as well, and the images he brought back contain both the poetry of the occidental gaze as well as the realities of the
contemporary moment. Immersed in the sand-colored light characteristic of Esser’s photographs, seemingly endless horizons
stretch across the entire image surface, divvy it up into water, air, and distant coastal strips, which often seem like mirages.
The impression of time and placelessness is, nevertheless, deceiving: each shot is entitled with the year and place name
of its genesis. And these names are at once steeped in history and reveal the present-day political situation of the region
– an aesthetically fascinating game of deception with past, myth and present.
Elger Esser is represented by the RX Gallery because he have a special bound to France. In fact his mother and
grandmother were born in Bordeaux, France. As he said for an interview at the RX Gallery, Paris, in April, he is German
and that helped him to see French’s landscapes differently than the people inside the country. His eye (and obviously his
camera) had captured the magic yet real beauty of France. Like Jean-Bastille Camille Corot (french painter of the 19th
century) before him, the theme of the souvenir is omnipresent in their work, mixing the reminiscences of a site and the
emotions that remain associated in Esser’s memory.