RENAULT – Tech'Art – Sécurité dans l'objectif

An intinerant exhibition by Adine Sagalyn 

Initial installation : Renault headquarters, Boulogne, January 2006

Step into the entrance of Renault headquarters just outside Paris and you would not expect to find a display of tropical fish glittering from one aquarium to the next. Come closer and you see that they are not aquariums but light-boxes, showing photographs of objects spilled in jewelled patterns across the screen.

There are 42 light boxes suspended at shoulder height on charcoal grey plinths. Walk between them, under the airy skylight of the entrance hall, and you are caught in a liquid geometry of forms, a luminous conversation between one photographic composition and the next.

They all have something in common : their subject is a specially constructed cross-section of a Renault car, colour-coded by an engineer to highlight various aspects of security. This is what photographer Adine Sagalyn has explored to such startling effect, making her images out of close-ups of the steering wheel and airbag, safety belt, bumper, axle and headrest, hood, headlight and shock absorber.

She has tilted her lens close up against these body parts, the edge that might identify them often beyond the frame of her image, the repeated grain and groove, punched hole or serration now making a rhythmic statement of its own. This effet is in turn multiplied, since any one tableau is composed of many photographs, juxtaposed till they look like images in a kaleidoscope being turned with hypnotic slow motion.

Instead of the hungering forward movement of the motor car, Adine Sagalyn's patterns take the eye inward, rippling and weaving diagonally, scattering or floating, spiralling away to some infinite space within themselves. The beauty of the exhibition is in this opening out of an inner space, almost audible in the way it breathes, the gravity of metal, plastic and cloth changed into a weightless caravan of forms filled with light.

Close your eyes after coming away form the exhibition and the colours continue to pulse : gold and carbon and snow-grey, freshly cut silver, geranium red, touches of white and cornflower blue. To one side of the entrance hall you can see into the sliced half of a car which is the subject of the exhibition, its painted parts no longer prosaically functional, but the exposed workings of some exotic beast in which Adine Sagalyn has taken her shimmering journey.

Denis Hirson

January 2006