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The shadow of the earth - 2018 /2021

The photographs come from different contexts (laboratories, scientific archives, the Alps, among others), and are rooted in a residency in a contemporary optical laboratory, using laser light as a tool and research object. The researchers and engineers thus find themselves in a context similar to that of a film laboratory, where the laboratory tolerates only one type of light during manipulations.
light during manipulations. The laboratory experiment room thus produces a space of chiaroscuro, of more or less controlled projections, where faces and bodies melt into punctual and fabricated nights. Shadows, landscapes and objects respond to this space in an ambiguous way, spaces that are not situated, sometimes reversed. Deep down, a profound feeling of fiction settles in, of withdrawal into a world that cannot be explained.
The shadow of the earth* does not project itself onto a logical space, nor is it logical, because the light, even if coherent, is not logical either. The light of the laser joins that of fire - the highest technicality that of the archaic - to leave us finally without an answer, a simple spectator of these strange observers who gravitate in a dark world, the reverse side of our own décor - the reverse side of our augmented, over-lit lives. In the background a secret lurks, which stirs our eye without allowing it to close in a peaceful darkness. Disasters are to be expected, in the calm of the artificial night, the manufactured suns, and the optical seas...

*The shadow of the earth" is a quotation from Kepler, dedicated to King Rudolph II from Paralipomena to Vitellion.

Public Contemporary Art Collection
Private Collection

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