Les Jours

For the last twenty years Josef Nadj has never departed from the same ritual. Each time he returns to Pannonia, he takes the wheel of an ageless Russian four wheel drive, Nikon on the passenger seat, to roam the land of his birth in the north of Vojvodina. He takes photographs, “in a state of presence in the world, attuned to the sensibility of sites, my consciousness entirely absorbed in contemplation of nature and the authentic moment”.

Nadj photographs landscapes: fields, rivers, wild and cultivated tracts, desert plateaux, the high grasses. And without fail he also photographs farms – isolated, dilapidated, or abandoned, in the vast plains of this “little triangle of territory baptized the corner of tempests”. This time, indoor landscapes. Run-down petrified buildings, scattered across the rolling countryside in these wide-open expanses of Vojvodina. The occupants missing – vanished without leaving an address. Today these buildings, open to the four winds, are destitute dislocated silent relics, primitive sculptures in the process of dissolution. Clay, straw and dirt already overtaken by vegetation, soon returning to earth, time, and nature.

Inside, jumbled together on worn-out walls: chalk, pigment, strata of clay and limestone, askew cracks, faded family photos, arabesques of colour blanched by the passing years, clocks with time suspended…

From these collective works where natural agents and temporal material are superimposed, Nadj has grasped and seized all their picturality. These motifs, with their multifarious variations, echo contemporary art history movements, from Jackson Pollock’s drip painting to Claudio Parmiggiani’s Delocazione. Nadj gives shape – in passing – to the metaphysics of sites and the dramaturgy of absence, pursuing the trace left by the passage of humans in the labyrinth of memory and time.

Jean-François  Ducrocq