Impatience

… This highly controlled fragility delineates the character of Jean-François Spricigo’s photographs in that they don’t show or capture their objects, but are made to spring within a precarious duration, by way of a chastened and enduring embrace. In a jewel box of luxurious silence claimed by the dignity of each living entity, lifted to the level of a natural event, of a small miracle of Being.

Whether it be a motionless owl, a leaping squirrel, a flock of ducks – a fortiori, cats and dogs startled in their solitude – never have we felt the otherness of these creatures, that they belong, as familiar as they are, to a world apart, a foreign world we can only envy for its wild beauty,nobility and more importantly, its innocence.

Because, on the edge of an apparition which seems to threaten to disappear, the eye operating does not project outside, but introjects the radical alterity of each animal, collecting it in an almost ghostlike flickering, on this diamond point where the most ordinary becomes disturbing, the most banal foreign, the most intimate unknown. One will easily recognize here a very sensitive derivation of “the uncanny”, so dear to Freud who defines it as a repressed representation giving free rein to an affectivity transformed into anxiety. With the difference that Jean-François Spricigo’s timeless impressionism defuses the anxiety through a gentleness, a delicacy that is another name for grace.

Cécile Guilbert, 2015
Translation by Pierre Guglielmina

a breath
I expected
an air of departure
over there, elsewhere
no longer from here,
I listened to myself
so much angst
abandoned
I cursed the stars
the wind replied
I listened

Driven by impatience I roam the world, contemplating the unravelling of my strategies.
Huge world, short legs, and my head in the clouds. I was going around in circles in the closed circuit of habit, seeking a perspective to lean on.
Absurd.
Walking again, aimless now, already my steps crash through the certainty zone; I quit the city. World erected by and for Man – comfortable, by prison standards – reassuring, yoked to a justice of vested interests – reasonable. As I attempted to leave, the outer disquiet led to the inward calm. And yet, only seconds from myself, I couldn’t make it. Know nothing, sniff everything, whispered the wind, you are nothing, observed the bird, so stop trying to be, the wind confirmed.nYour solitude is your freedom, released from attachments, the encounter is possible.
Thus Life is expressed through those who embody it. The language doesn’t matter, immemorial language confined in the flesh comes to life precisely when it is not feared. No Magic, just listen, pay attention and the miracle will emerge.

Jean-François Spricigo, 2015
Translation by Nissim Marshall