Greg Storer

Greg Storer's pictures stem from his most personal memories and from the intimate depths where they have matured, and so everything begins with photographs, childhood photographs (of the family, characterized by their changelessness) those of youth and early adulthood (photographs of American Football which he played and which are marked by their intense dynamic). Far from wanting to confine himself to the exactness of memory or delve into the its specifics, Storer seizes the photographic souvenir: he isolates it from the precise moment in which it was born, dissociates from the places that have nurtured it, erases the details of bodies and faces, forsakes the colors, blurs the clear lines of the original image in order to capture the intrinsic elements of light and movement and assert the importance of the bands of subject matter and of the facets brushed aside. By distancing himself from the unique features of memory, counterbalanced by the avouched presence of pastels as a painting medium (limited to a range of blacks, grays and white) and by the use of planes which evoke cinematographic art, Storer reveals the core of his artistic approach. Thus, every viewer comes to see these pastels as fragments of stories in which he invents and inserts his own path through life. The instant laid bare by Storer suggests a piece of a story in which we can imagine what went before and what will follow, we are attracted by the zones of shade and light and by the mystery unfolding there.

Far from the chilly process of pushing memory to one side, pastel as a painting material bestows on memory transformed by the drawing, that flesh and blood character which is inevitably linked to it. Beyond the subject matter, we constantly revel in the stroke of the crayon on which infuses its own life into the drawings, even in cases where the initial pose seems stilted, and lends a sense of presence to a raw material which we know quite well belongs to the past.