Basses Lumières

Following a residency at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM) in 2019-2020, Caroline Corbasson receives a photographic archive which she does not know what to do with... For her, these hundred negatives of space views are relics, obsolete objects that she finds beautiful in themselves. When she shows them to Andrea Montano, he has this photographer's reflex to want to make prints of them. At that time, Andréa had just obtained a position in a silver lab in Aubervilliers, where he spent most of his time. It was then that the artists began to experiment with the negatives. Caroline Corbasson comes from a drawing background, she is not familiar with the photo lab. Thanks to Andrea Montano, she learns the technique of printing and discovers all its possibilities. The main thread of the Heat series is the color spectrum: from warm blue to the icy red of space. Reds are traditionally classified as hot colors, which is corroborated by many realities: infra-reds and microwaves are waves capable of heating. [...] The blues are cold. In space, the color depends on the temperature of a body. The higher the temperature of a body, the more its color, its light emitted up the electromagnetic spectrum: at 37 ° C, our body emits in infrared. At 1,000°C, incandescent steel is reddish-orange. At 3 000 °C, the filament of a lamp is white. The hottest stars at 30 000 °C are blue.

When Laure-Anne (AREA Books) discovered the first proofs of this work, the editor proposed to Caroline Corbasson and Andrea Montano to produce a book.

Tracks is another story, also conceived with four hands, during the confinements due to the Covid epidemic, when Andrea Montano and Caroline Corbasson feel "deprived of spring". They stage flowers in Caroline Corbasson's studio in Clichy. The artists deliver a work uniting two sciences a priori distant: astrophysics and botany. These two fields of research inspire them to make charcoal prints that reveal a distant filiation between the plant and mineral kingdoms. Under a black light, the petals of a flower are adorned with phosphorescent spots resulting from the phenomenon of pollination, but which under the artists' lens become the seminal traces of the stars on their terrestrial progeny.

Caroline Carbosson (1989, Fra) is the granddaughter of one of the protagonists of the foundation of the Angénieux company, created in 1935 and renowned for nearly a century for the manufacture of photographic and cinematographic lenses. A graduate of Saint Martin School, London and ENSBA Paris, Caroline Corbasson belongs to the young generation of artists who combine physical reality and human cultures. She describes the current world, its societies, its cultures, from the materials that compose it, and not from purely social or even human data. Without claiming the posture of a scientist, the artist explores the way in which the observation of space and the improvement of astronomical tools have caused a rupture between the immediate perception, that of the average individual, and that of scientists. His drawings, photographs, sculptures and videos scrutinize this expanse, relating the infinitely large, whose evolution dates back to an ante-cultural period, to the depth of the infinitely small, perceptible through the tools of science.