Guillaume Benoît
Février 2025
ANTOINE SCHNECK
Oliviers
Antoine Schneck is interested in the other, in all its forms, it is obvious. So portrait, yes, the photographs of the olive trees are.
"In the heart of Puglia, I went," Antoine Schneck tells us, "to meet the thousand-year-old inhabitants of this arid countryside in the South of Italy. They were my hosts, Ottavio, Gino, Cosimo, and the others, as these men who succeed one another from generation to generation to take care of them call them. I waited until nightfall to photograph them, when all the color of the landscape fades, and the olive trees are entirely adorned with silver tones, revealing their mineral forms."
His interest lies as much in otherness as in the concrete forms that it takes to appear to us, forms that force us, in order to truly look at them with lucidity, to question the modalities of seeing. These incredible works, for which Antoine Schneck multiplied and assembled the images before reworking each tree, leaf by leaf, are nothing other than the search for what makes the portrait, individuality.
"The world is vast: no two days are alike, nor even two hours, and no two leaves of a tree have ever been alike since the creation of the world; and the pure and authentic productions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from one another." 1 This is by John Constable, it could be dedicated to the Work of Antoine Schneck.
Antoine Schneck's Olive Trees are part of the very identity of his work. Once again, what is to be rendered in these portraits is an inseparable mixture of vision and emotion.
1 Charles Robert Lesli, John Constable based on the memories collected by CR Leslie, translated from English by L. Bazalgette (1905), Paris, ENSB-A, “Beaux-arts Histoire”, 1996, p.237