Dolorès Marat
in Gaspé

“The photographs of Dolorès Marat invite us to dream. They seem themselves to be extracted from sleep, as though the camera had captured not an image of reality but secret images, stolen from under our closed eyelids. These images are intimate, evasive. The diffuse light they’re made up of, dark and bright at the same time, like a pale sun, is evocative of dawn or dusk. The world that Dolorès Marat captures is dreamlike and imaginary. The haziness of the photographs is the same one we meet in our dreams – the fogginess of our sleeping imaginations. The furtive silhouettes, headed we know not where, are still taking part in that dreamlike dimension. We’d like to hold those characters back, ask them where they’re going; since they’re not identified, we’d like to identify ourselves with them.

[…]

“For the novelist that I am, every photograph by Dolorès Marat suggests the beginning of a story. They all seem to me to be taken from a tale. They are, each of them, the image of a narrative. They give off an impression of movement: whether in a car, on a skating rink or in the sky, every image is extracted from an effervescence. The movement is that of a story to unfold. The haziness, present in each photograph, is itself that of a certain speed, captured. Even when Dolorès Marat takes a shot of the ocean, it seems that the ocean has a story to tell. Why are those waves so choppy, what wind just came by, what boats, what stories of love, of life, and of the drowned?

“You’d almost believe it’s a drawing, sometimes. And yet, Dolorès Marat does not rework them, she captures reality, and that’s what’s unbelievable. Starting from the real, she creates a dreamlike and singular image. Which is perhaps what characterizes true artists: seizing the world through their singular prism, then making that prism universal. Dolorès Marat makes us want to return to childhood, where the dream is king.” – Line Papin