The eternal recourse or the inner citadel
(2007-2024)
The photographs gathered here are part of a patient endeavor, begun two decades ago and pursued to this day, under the title The Eternal Recourse or the Inner Citadel.
This series seeks to explore landscapes as reflections of human interiority, to read in the fabric of the world the traces of a soul in motion. By placing these images side by side, it invites a form of silent dialogue between sky, sea, mountain, and forest — spaces which, though belonging to distinct registers of nature, converge around a constant motif: the clouds.
Here, clouds become the common thread linking the elements. In the sky, they stretch out like a thought in motion; on the mountain, they cling to the slopes, follow the contours, evoking the persistence of mystery at the heart of reality; in the forest, they are called mist, enveloping the trunks and diffusing the light like an evocation of memory and forgetting. Thus, the visible becomes a metaphor for the invisible: nature expresses an inner tension, a reflection on permanence and transformation, on the duality between the solidity of the world (mountain, earth) and the fleetingness of time (clouds, light). This visual dialogue invites slow contemplation, where each photograph opens a space for silence and inner listening.
Through a play of visual and poetic echoes, I have sought to compose a meditation on time and on the unity of the world. Each isolated image offers a singular atmosphere; together, they form a corpus where contemplation becomes an act of listening. The eternal recourse evoked in the title may be nothing other than this constant return to nature — refuge and mirror, inner citadel where the story of the world is replayed, a dialogue between the soul — elusive, ever-changing, yet ever-present — and that which surrounds it.
Like Ernst Jünger who, in his time, sought an inner refuge in the sylvan cathedrals (The Forest Passage, 1980), these places constitute for some of us essential shelters — symbolic or real — where it becomes possible to withdraw, if only for a moment, from the noise of the contemporary world.
