Isola Nova, Philippe Calandre

Following the exhibition “Fiction Factories“ in 2012 at the Gallery Esther Woerdehoff in which Philippe Calandre developed the fictional factories, Jean-Michel Wilmotte proposed the artist to create a new series for his Venetian gallery. After many trips to Venice, Philippe Calandre imagined a series of new islands in Venice inhabited by large industrial structures mixed with fragments of traditional Venetian architecture.

These new ghostly-like “building-islands”, appear to be floating among a classic iconography and somewhat disturbing chimeric constructions that multiply themselves. These photographic compositions between documentation and collage are exhibited at the Fondaco degli Angeli in Venice from 17 December 2013 to 15 February 2014.

This oneiric Venice is the result of a skilful interweaving of images drawn from the historic city of Venice, the old town, and the Venice of the “edge of the lagoon”, the peripheral Venice and the industrial area of Porto Marghera. We recognize the most famous and sumptuous architectures of the past, and in particular those linked to the industrial past of Venice, especially the island of La Giudecca, during the second half of the XIX and XX centuries. His visions refer to us to certain precedents in architecture, for example Also Rossi and his design for the theatre La Fenice and also Bernard Huet and his unforgettable magazine cover of a collage of Venice, for L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui in 1980.

The utopic Venice of Philippe Calandre makes us travel among the islands in the Lagoon, among the colours of an imaginary Venice, a reconstruction that denies the progressive destruction of forms in the water. His images are an enigma, a sense of timelessness swaying between irrationality and form.