From Rothko’s monochromes to Sugimoto’s contemplative images, via the ponds of Sigean painted daily by Piet Moget, the marine horizon has nourished myths as much as travel narratives for ages. A line of departure or a promise of elsewhere in painting, facing the ocean, human beings measure both the vastness of the world and their own capacity to dream it.
At first, it is a line, a minimalist, even abstract border, that divides the world between above and below, or reality and what the human imagination projects onto it. It is precisely in this place that Jacques Mataly has been working for more than twenty-five years. Now brought together in a beautiful book, his images compose an obstinate meditation on this dividing line that we think stable, even though it never ceases to recede. The first photographs in the series Ligne d’horizon date back to 1999. Presented for the first time at the Château d’Eau, in Toulouse, during the Michel Dieuzaide era, they have since continued to be renewed and refined through the photographer’s stays on the edges of seas and oceans.
The protocol seems simple: a square format, the image divided exactly in half, and nothing else. No identifiable places or picturesque anecdotes, no sailors’ tales either. The panorama is stripped of every effect or distortion, retaining only this indistinct boundary. A separation that serves as a link; astonishingly, it is the very essence of the sea’s liquid and the light of the sky that seem to come together in an elusive abstraction. For the horizon possesses this paradoxical nature: it is before us yet remains inaccessible, perfectly visible and yet impossible to reach. It separates as much as it connects; between the near and the distant, it is like a fictional seam of the world.
In Mataly’s work one senses the wind, the humidity, the patient waiting of the artist set up facing the open sea, behind his tripod, watching less for an event than for an atmosphere. At a time when images saturate daily life, these horizons, reduced to a few shades of orange, blue, or green, paradoxically open a space of escape. The eye begins to contemplate, and the square photographed , with its rigorous geometry, transforms the impossible meeting of air and water into an inner journey.
The opening of the exhibition will also be an opportunity to present L’horizon incertain, published by L’Atelier Contemporain, a beautiful book that extends the exhibition as one pursues the desire for elsewhere or the unknown, carried by this distant line that continues to magnetize the human gaze and yet never stops slipping away.
Jean-Jacques Ader
“L’horizon incertain” exhibition by Jacques Mataly at Galerie Ombres Blanches in Toulouse; from May 29 to July 31, 2026. Publication of the book by Éditions de l’Atelier Contemporain. Information: https://www.ombres-blanches.fr/post/8401/jacques-mataly
