“FIENTASIA” Alain-Gilles Bastide’s latest series (2023–2024), stands in a distinctly French tradition that seeks to carve paths into our everyday surroundings to reveal still-unknown worlds.
Think of those naturalists Denis Brihat, Jean-Pierre Sudre, or even Jean Dieuzaide who, each in his own way in the 1960s, entered photographic trances through the living matter of still lifes: fruits, vegetables, the molten substance of pitch, or the infinitesimal within the bark of wood.
AGB delights in uncovering in reality the traces of time, and the poetry of the labyrinths of his memory along the streets of his neighborhood, with a camera and a masterful command of both color and black-and-white. His unexpected images open before our astonished eyes spaces, forms, volumes, and lights as if illuminated from within. It is a fantastic, surreal journey into the heart of a universe within our reach, one that the photographer’s “fientaisie” and talent transcend.
Claude Nori, Publisher / Photographer, 2024
(…) It’s highly unusual—these images one would quite literally have to call “shit” (which your term “fientophotography” implies, doesn’t it?). I’m struck by the return of very lyrical forms, essentially a cosmological lyricism, arising from materials of so little nobility. But isn’t all art, in the end, the residue of a long, slow digestion (of texts, images, knowledge, sensations, ordeals, wanderings—what have you), that is to say, an excretion. In that sense, your latest photographs hit, with brilliance and humor, the very heart of the matter: what constitutes the dark substrate of cultural objects, barbaric and sordid, yes, yet always redeemed by sublimation. It is that sublimation your work still performs to the fullest (it is beautiful) while nonetheless dialectically undercutting its very foundations (they are droppings). In short, a kind of jarring slogan: “See how beautiful it is, and how it’s shit.”
Philippe Petit, Art critic, 2025
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October 29, 2025 to November 30, 2025
