Exhibition “L’Envolée” at the Amarrage Gallery | March 15 - 30, 2025, extended until April 6
Galerie Amarrage presents L’Envolée, an exhibition by Muriel Pénicaud from March 15 to 30, 2025 (extended until Sunday, April 6). This exhibition celebrates the quest for elevation and freedom, where the works of its two guest artists, Gala, a visual artist, and Freid, a ceramist, resonate with its ode to dreams and flight.
Amarrage Gallery: 88, rue des Rosiers, 93400 Saint Ouen
Open daily from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
"Anyone who wants to learn to fly must first learn to stand, walk, run, climb, and dance—you don't conquer flight with your first flap of the wings!"
Thus spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche.
This exhibition celebrates the meaning of existence, from our first steps to our last breath.
She embodies this quest that makes us grow, elevate ourselves, push boundaries, escape traps, laugh at our daring, and dare to transcend. For some, she even allows us to touch the sky of freedom.
The flight of the bird has been my school of photography. It taught me to capture in the palm of my hand an emotion, a look, a play of light, an impetus, a movement, or a line of force. I discovered how to seize the unseizable, free my imagination, and observe nature and humanity in all their beauty and depth.
In the enchanting marriage of the bird and the light, we are dazzled before an Icarus who would not burn his wings, but would gently lead us into the heart of the sun, within us and around us.
Photographing flight requires absolute patience. You have to wait, wait again, become one with the bird's plumage, subtly sense when it will take off, and then capture the grace of the moment in the blink of an eye. If you wait to see it take off before pressing the shutter, it's too late, it's out of frame. The bird launches into the air on an impulse from its body, then, suspended for a moment, only then does it open its wings. A life lesson for the flight of each of us...
The child and the bird share the flight and the promise of life. Childhood remains forever this lost continent of our own mystery. One must crouch down, look up to contemplate the child ready for flight, like a bird, and listen to their cry, their joy, their silence. Then he or she carries us away in poetry.
By connecting earth, water, and sky, the tree is at the heart of life. By photographing the tree, I seek to immerse myself in it, to embrace it, to feel from its roots to the sky the sumptuous power of life that connects us to all beings through time and space, and that carries us in its unwavering flight towards the sky.
In love as in grief, in contemplation as in desire, we constantly and clumsily try to fly away, to free ourselves or to rise above. Who among us has never dreamed of being a bird?
What if everything around us were an invitation to take flight? Spread wings, a ray of light that pierces and dazzles, a gaze that stirs the soul, a floating veil, a shadow dancing in the moonlight... Today, I invite you on a poetic journey, carried on the wings of photography.
"The wind is rising, we must try to live" - Paul Valéry
