Back to nature
The attribution at the end of 2023 of a research grant by Adagp enabled me to produce the series of photographs I am submitting to you. It is entitled Retour à la nature.
In the 80s and 90s, I mainly photographed tulips with a Polaroid SX70. For Retour à la nature, I photographed all the flowers with my smarphone, which gave me great spontaneity in the shots and enabled me to take photographs that I wouldn’t have done with a reflex camera.
The smarphone has enabled me to create more sophisticated, conceptual and decorative works. From the very start, I wanted to go beyond the characteristics of conceptual art and move towards something more retinal. My aim was to create a series of works that would show what had been photographed, while at the same time revealing something that wasn’t there. To create abstractions from realistic figures, to allow mental images to emerge that lead the viewer to question his or her perception. I photographed lupins, canas, chlorophytums, coleus and garrya elliptica, which enriched my visual vocabulary.
The post-production I carried out alongside the shots enabled me to adapt them to the work that was developing and which, I later realized, was clearly impregnated with the minimalist music of Steve Reich and Terry Riley and unconsciously influenced by the sixteenth-century earthenware tiles seen some time earlier at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. The sudden awareness of these reminiscences gave me a freedom that I had unwittingly restricted by overly strict parameters.
Unglee December 13, 2024
