Shadows Get Darker When They Overlap

February 16 - March 1, 2024

Greg Gilet & Felipe Olivares

The city. Where people, even in their absence, are on display for all to see. Where delight is to be found, as Italo Calvino writes, ‘not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours’.

What do you ask of your city?

On the surrounding walls, twelve photographs by Felipe Olivares and Greg Gilet question the same place. Routine brings Gilet here on the weekend, while Olivares takes to the streets at night. Captured out-of-step with the heaving, mid-week bustle, the slower pace allows a certain intimacy.
Longing and proximity are recurring themes in Olivares’ photographs. Taken in the late-night hours (when the city feels like it’s yours alone), there’s a melancholy to be found between the shadows and neon. It’s also felt in the last song, the lonely last pie, and the last steps on the journey home. Veiled in darkness and taken from afar, there’s a sense that Olivares is holding back information – side streets, faces, the source of light on the roller door – permitting the city to unfold at his discretion.

While Olivares keeps his distance, Gilet’s pursuit is insatiably social. Coming in closer to his subjects, gestures and expressions continue out of frame, leaving partial views that are full of suggestions. What are they waiting for? Does she always eat alone? We identify with way people hold, withhold, and declare themselves. An eye for textures and patterns makes these unconnected city-dwellers appear costumed – smaller parts of a larger story.

Around the room, the camera has variably been turned downwards (quite literally into the foundations of the city) or it catches blurred or shadowed faces. Ours is a time of constantly renegotiating ethical issues around privacy, still, these snapshots convey tender, at times filmic, sensations of closeness. For Olivares and Gilet, migrants from Colombia and France respectively, their studies of the city aren’t concerned with anything as elusive as the truth, but rather, scratch at the edges of delight.

Text by Emily Sullivan