The title of the series, Carbon Catchers, is an evocation of the Dreamcatcher. “In certain Indigenous cultures of North America, the dream-catcher acts as a filter, that captures the dreams sent by spirits, preserves beautiful images from the night and burns the bad visions at the first ray of light .”
With Carbon Catchers, in the continuation of his Extint Cities, Thierry Cohen offers us something like a Song of nocturnal forests bathed in the light of their own stars. The same forests which, since the dawn of time, have enabled the emergence of the human species, are today threatened by the very one that sprang from them. A tragic irony, in which humanity, by sealing their fate, may also be sealing its own.
Each work in this series is a hybrid creation, in which Thierry Cohen sews sky and earth together, returning to the forest its stars, not just any stars, but precisely those we should see there. He harvests these stars in a place free of any light pollution, at the same latitude as each of these forests, sometimes at their edges when they are far enough from cities.
Night transforms the familiar landscape into a mysterious, almost fantastical setting. Darkness envelops, unsettles and reassures all at once; it erases reference points, forms mingle, and every sound becomes an echo that awakens the imagination. The rustle of leaves, the crack of branches, the distant call of a nocturnal bird take on the air of murmurs and warnings. The forest vibrates with a deep breathing. One feels both a great solitude and a powerful, almost palpable presence, inviting humility and contemplation. The forest becomes a sovereign world, where one moves beneath the stars, between dream and reality.
For this exhibition, Thierry Cohen and the Var Department invited artists Bethan and Robert Kellough to compose an original sound work that accompanies his photographic works like an invisible breath – the nocturnal soul of these landscapes.
Thierry Cohen, born in Paris in 1963, is an internationally recognized visual artist for his series Villes éteintes, presents at the Maison départementale de la nature du Plan, for the first time, the photographic series Carbon Catchers, initiated in 2017.
In the continuation of Villes éteintes, this work asserts itself as a nocturnal song of forests, bathed in the light of their own stars.
His work powerfully and poetically explores our relationship to the world and to nature. It questions contemporary man’s relationship to his habitat, to his origins, to the impact of his activities on his environment and, finally, to himself and to his own future. It also questions notions of diversity and borders.
Like the pioneers of photography, who also manipulated the image using the various techniques of their time already in constant evolution the digital technologies applied to still images have, for more than thirty years, offered him the possibility not of transforming an immediate representation of reality for purely spectacular or aesthetic ends, but of reinjecting meaning into it in order to question our relationship to the reality of the world around us.
From his photographs, taken as if with a large-format view camera where time stretches, to his work within his “digital laboratory”, which increasingly resembles the painter’s gesture playing with light and with the night his work reveals a world from before, to be recreated: the one we blot out, that we no longer see…
His works, between poetry and commitment, stand as a true visual manifestos.
His work is held in numerous public and private collections, in France and abroad. He is represented by the Danziger gallery in New York and collaborates with the In-Dependance gallery in Antwerp.
General curator of the exhibition Ricardo Vazquez
Exhibition design Agence PAM
Thierry Cohen : Carbon Catchers
Until 29 March 2026
Maison départementale de la nature du Plan
Chemin de La Bouilla, 83130 La Garde
