PORTFÓLIO MARGUERITE BORNHAUSER

When Black is
Burned
Simon Baker
Director, MEP, Paris
The overall effect of Bornhauser’s practice, however, is to
remind us of the way in which colour can echo, not only
from one image to another, but from one place, or one
moment in time, to another. Colour as subject-matter, or
rather, colour as a means of producing photographic
representations of the real world that surpass the sum of
their parts, becomes a kind of psychological projection into
or onto the everyday. In a sense this is why Bornhauser has
so much in common with writers like Hammett, painters
like Henri Matisse, or theorists like Gaston Bachelard, each
of whom were sensitive to colour in their own unique and
personal way. More in common, one could say, with
pictorial or linguistic abstractions derived or drawn from
colour, than with other photographers for whom colour
is simply a technical issue to be resolved and exploited. In
her most recent work, moreover, Bornhauser has sought to
engage not only with colour within the visual field but in
the process of producing photographs as objects in the
world. From sumptuous Cibachrome prints (for many, the
holy grail of colour photographic reproduction) to new
experiments with moving image and printing on fabrics,
Bornhauser has taken the practice of re-showing the world
around us as a brighter and more beautiful place to the
next level in the terms by which her images occupy space,
while never straying far from the unique truths at the heart
of the way that only she sees things."