The artist Pierre Dumont is one of the many heirs of Alexander von Humboldt; like the German naturalist, he has dedicated his life to getting to know the people, cultural traditions and different ecosystems of Venezuela, where he has lived for more than thirty-five years. His recent photographs examine the dense vegetation, waterways, beaches and ruins of the country’s oldest national park, Henri Pittier National Park. Avoiding the conventions of documentary photography, Dumont’s compositions evoke the aesthetic of the picturesque of the late 18th century, which sought a balance between classical beauty and the sublime.
The title of this exhibition, “Water Fuerte(Strong Water), nods to the abundance of water in the Caribbean cloud forest while paying homage to Jesuit priest Ignacio Castillo, whose social platform Aguafuerte was founded in 1982. in an abandoned hydroelectric plant inside the park. Water serves as the material basis for Dumont’s photographic experiments, which include homemade emulsion mixtures and film developing, toning and bleaching techniques. he sometimes calls on digital, the photographer structures his work as an exploration of vintage processes in resistance to the immediacy of the production and consumption of contemporary images.To create the blue in the large format cyanotypes of endemic ferns dominating the walls, Dumont adapted the original formula invented by John Herschel, a pioneer of the medium in the 1840s. For a series of depictions of men surrounded by nature, the artist used a pinhole camera, then printed the images in platens palladium paintings – a technique that dates back to 1870. Two small landscape photographs are the only images to break from the monochromatic color scheme, an effect achieved through a non-metallic process involving gum bichromate. Rather than inviting nostalgia, Dumont’s multi-layered historical references remind us of the fragility of our present.
