The exhibition presents a work by American artist Lewis Baltz that provokes critical thought on the relationships between architecture, landscape, and photography. The New Industrial Parks is part of a monographic series developed in the 1970s (The Tract Houses, Maryland, Nevada and Park City) that deals with wide-ranging cultural and philosophical questions about industrial zones in the urban landscape. By focusing his attention on the familiar, Baltz created a powerful work in his critical photographic approach to the built environment.

Fifty-one images, laid out in a three-row grid, reorganize space and allow the expression of new relationships between architecture, landscape and photography. Under the harsh light of a rectilinear universe full of the closed doors and enigmatic façades of the new industrial parks, the artist gives life to surfaces and textures, captures both the opaque and the transparent, and seems to project, beyond the deceptively banal frontal views, the buildings’ entire life cycle. This tension between the difficulty of the subject and the formal beauty of the resulting images gives the work its visual power.

Curated by Louise Désy, CCA.