Les perspectives (video)

The period we are going through, and the darkness in which it has plunged almost all the trades and all the citizens, has by contrast, highlighted the pressing need to maintain contact with the outside world which is prevented by the health situation.

For the past twenty years, my artistic project has been part of an exploratory movement unfolding in concentric circles. I began by surveying Normandy, in particular its sports clubs and learning centers, then the Hauts de France and finally I undertook over the last ten years large photographic campaigns on territories with large perimeters, in Europe, then in the Japanese archipelago and finally in the Americas and India working on various forms of communities.

The present situation forces him to reconsider his practice.

If we feel, as artists and citizens, the need for these new realities to be verbalized, made explicit, imagined, and surpassed by the plural words of creators from all fields of expression, there are many of us who are still searching for the modalities.

How, simply, to make image when all those which prevail, in the media and the spirits, the ones feeding the others in a kind of vicious spiral, do nothing but assert the same representations of our obsessive impediment and of the haunting withdrawal of the bodies and the spirits?

What image can surface in this thick black flux? How can I, as an individual, continue to create when I can no longer travel? Towards which community to go when the gathering is proscribed? My position, in fact, is here, in Normandy, in Rouen. From then on, working downstairs, at one’s door… the other, at one’s window.

The window is still a frontier, between the intimacy to which the passer-by has no access and the public space, between an interior where one can live with an uncovered face and an exterior towards which, despite everything, one continues to aspire.

I think then – I’ve been thinking about it since March – of this painting by Manet, presenting a bourgeois family on the balcony, and then also of its sarcastic reinterpretation in the form of a memento mori by Magritte, decades later.

With Perspectives, I wish to portray, within the perimeter of the Rouen Metropolis, the inhabitants, women, men, of all generations and socio-cultural backgrounds, at their window or at their door.

The filmic device is voluntarily simple: it associates a fixed shot with a slow motion filming. Recently tested during a commission carried out in the summer of 2020 for the cultural direction of the Principality of Monaco, this device allows the realization of portraits decomposing the movements of opening and closing, discovering the invisible choreography of a daily body movement.