More than 10 years ago, Erwan Frotin began photographing fruits, shells, people and minerals in a studio. Caught up in the game of this organic inventory, he has continued to perpetuate this learning by traveling to new encounters in the heart of nature and human society.
During his tribulations throughout the world (Japan, Hawaii, Chile, Costa Rica, India, etc.), Erwan Frotin has built up photographic archives of places, phenomenons and organisms, showing the forms of living things (animals, plants, unique human beings, minerals, fiery skies and waterfalls) like so many signs, wonders and questions.
FLUX I evokes, at first glance, the logbook of an explorer. The idea of wild life is approached in a passionate and optimistic way: that of a poetic language, whose means of expression is an alphabet of icons.
Cabinet of curiosities of a new kind, unclassifiable, aimed at connoisseurs as well as children. Erwan Frotin dreams that the experience of the images he offers to the viewer acts like an elixir, or a hypnosis session.
May these inspire, in any case, an awakening of heart and mind, a renewal of ecological feeling. With the hope that by better understanding where he is going, and where the world is going, humans can sense where Creation is carrying them.
This collection is now giving rise to an unprecedented editorial project: a kind of encyclopedia, broken down into a series of collections. System ( of the same format) and space of freedom, which borrows the form of the process it tries to approach: the flow of life.
Erwan Frotin has brought together an artistic team around this editorial adventure: an editor, a graphic designer, a literary director, who will accompany and supervise all the volumes. Each new FLUX will result in an order placed with an author. of different fiction or non-fiction (novelists, poets, scientists, landscape architects, therapists). Each text will be never before published: short story, poem, short essay, meditation. Responding to the desire to blur the usual boundaries between genres.
A formal adventure that is also a celebration of the world. With the publication of its first collection, FLUX will give birth to the discovery of the travel diary and the dreamlike repertoire of photographer Erwan Frotin.
“The photographs brought together in this volume are the fruit of my travels and research. In distant or near places, I have captured them all myself, to show them to you. They are a transcription of the reality we share: a world still beautiful and true.” – Erwan Frotin
As part of its “Fluidities” exhibition, the MBAL (Le Locle, Switzerland) is devoting a retrospective to Erwan Frotin. Aptly titled “Rétrovision”, the exhibition takes place from February 5th to April 24 th, 2022.
FLUX I
A subjective encyclopedia of the natural world.
Photography by ERWAN FROTIN
Texts by ERWAN FROTIN, CELIA HOUDART, DAVID LEMAIRE, KRIPI MALVIYA
Published by NOTE NOTE EDITIONS
92 pages, 67 color photographs H270 mm × W270 mm
soft cover
Edition of 300 copies FR, 500 copies EN Limited edition of 18
Price: €45, CHF 47, £38, $50 | ISBN 978-2-493467-01-0
https://www.notenote.eu/
The limited edition of 18 copies includes one print on fine art paper, among 6 prints (21 x 26 cm, signed and numbered 1/3-3/3).
Pre-order from February 28, 2022
Available in bookstores from April 20, 2022
Exhibition
Locle Museum of Fine Arts, Switzerland
from February 5 to April 24, 2022
https://www.mbal.ch/