Since 1993 Joël Denot has photographed a white interior wall. The description is accurate and slightly misleading, because the wall in these pictures is a stage: coloured planes float in a void, frame one another, and drop shadows of one hue across another — orange into pale pink into blue into bright pink, red into green into pink into grey-blue.
The Color of Light, published by 5 Continents Editions in 2023, is the first monograph devoted to that long undertaking. It is a substantial but not oversized book — 128 pages, 22 × 31 cm — carrying French and English text, and its scale suits images whose subject is often a single chromatic interval.
The photographs resist the usual categories. They are not quite figurative and not abstract either; they belong to pictorial thinking as much as to photography. Look long enough and a body surfaces at the edge of an ethereal field, then withdraws. Denot’s own presence as maker is registered in that trace, which keeps the work in contact with the photographic act even as the surface drifts toward painting.
The procedure behind it is unusually disciplined. Denot, born in Rennes in 1961, worked as a studio photographer and then as a photojournalist in 1980s Paris before beginning, in 1993, to photograph a white wall. He has since worked at roughly thirty photographs a year, in natural light, as one-off prints, each series preceded by notes on lighting conditions, on the history of photography, and on whatever place he happened to be living in.
For collectors, the book provides a perspective on the continuity of Denot’s practice. This is the first sustained published account of a body of work made slowly and largely out of view, and it appears with accompanying texts by Paul Kendirgi and Bruno Remaury that set the pictures within a wider art-historical conversation.
