Based in Paris, France, Noémie Goudal is an artist whose work is described as being an investigation into photographs and films as dialectical images.
For her series titled In Search of the First Line, fragments of historic architecture were photographed then transposed onto the backdrop of buildings.
“At the Royal College, I did my dissertation on the way we build stories into images, and how they invented new devices – during the Middle Ages, and then with the Renaissance and its laws of perspective – to present a single story in a single canvas, through layering,” said Goudal in an interview with The Spaces. “I was very interested in how you can use the foreground, middleground and background to create different spaces, but also show different moments in time.”
“I wanted to work with different historical buildings without necessarily saying, ‘This building is from a specific moment in the middle-ages.’ For me, it’s about the idea of mixing different parts of history. I blur the frontiers between different moments of time in this way,” explained Goudal.
“My work is about creating a space – offering a landscape – where the viewer can live, and can create their own fiction,” added Goudal. “I’m telling the story through these backdrop images, but you don’t need to believe it. You can see the story is not true from the folds in the paper.”
