Virgil Brill

At dawn, at some dawns, a man get out of his house and takes paths. He looks far away, waits, and looks back, always very far.

Eventually and sometimes, the man stops and opens a little box in front of the real world. The real world’s light gets inside the opening of the box and flirts with the gelatin-silver-bromide.

From this encounter, few chemicals away  born an object baptized negative. The man whose name is Virgil Brill entrusts to another man the thing. This man is a well-known craftsman, who will slowly and with mystery, applied secrets discovered by his father and his grandfather. The result is here.

Strangely, within this result, there are allusions to old Chinese Taoist poets. Li Po, Tchouag-Tseu, Chen Tao and other members of their team. I put those funny men in a corner, they are disturbing – and I ask the first question: Is it a painting or a photograph?

It is photograph says Virgil – as Bresson would say from the Cineaste. But the question is not useless.

« I do not locate my work within anecdotes or current events. There are people who do this amazingly well, but I am neither descriptive nor narrative». And yet, the photographs Virgil Brill currently presents at the Chapelle des Pénitents Bleus in La Ciotat, get under the skin of this real that unveils itself before our eyes. His exhibition is entitled Migration - Migrations and speaks to us about these internal frontiers that are crossed in a clandestine fashion, at times with delight and at others with fear. It speaks to us about the free circulation of souls, the quest for an intimate right of sanctuary which would finally bring appeasement. It is therefore useless to look for illegal aliens, Bosniaks or Rwandians behind these nude silhouettes that people Virgil Brill's pictures in an obsessive manner. It is therefore useless to try and pin a name on these human forms the photographer has captured with his willfully out of focus lens. In another context, they would undoubtedly be nothing other than nudists, in the month of august, somewhere in France, on the Atalantic oceanfront. But, here neither the individuals, nor the space are identified. Stretches of sand, then sea, then sky, without end.

Horizons that overlap and mark the finitude of this world without however forbidding us to envision or hope for other possibles. And there, a little all around; these shadows that lurk. The anodine is muddled. There is no innocent situation, only the human condition, this status of gregarious animal that advances alone towards a destiny it ignores. The feeling of solitude emerges precisely from this multitude and haziness. The incessant play of the frames, in the formats multiplies the vantage points, produces what Virgil Brill names « configurations bearing meaning ». A sensory relief reinforced by a musical dimension (a sound installation by Georges Lartigau). Nor is the verbe absent as Jacques Serena declines his words (another tale of impossible love) around, in between and within the very beautiful book that places this encounter in another duration: that of the page.

Fred Kahn, in Le pavé, May-June 1998