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The Earth's Shadow - 2018 /2021
The photographs come from different contexts (laboratories, scientific archives, the Alps, among others), and are rooted in a residency in a contemporary optics laboratory, using laser light as a tool and object of research. The researchers and engineers find themselves in a context similar to that of a film laboratory, where only one type of light is tolerated during manipulations.
type of light. The laboratory experiment room thus produces a space of chiaroscuro, of more or less controlled projections, where faces and bodies melt into punctual, fabricated nights. Shadows, landscapes and objects respond to this space in an ambiguous way, spaces that are not situated, sometimes reversed. At the heart of it all is a profound sense of fiction, of withdrawal into a world that cannot be explained. The shadow of the earth* is not projected onto a logical space, nor is it logical, because light, even coherent light, is not logical either. The light of the laser meets the light of fire - the highest technicality meets the archaic, leaving us with no answers, simply spectators of these strange observers who gravitate in a dark world, the other side of our own décor - the other side of our augmented, over-lit lives. In the background, a secret lurks, drawing our attention without giving it the chance to close in a peaceful darkness. Disasters are to be expected, in the calm of artificial night, manufactured suns and optical seas... *The shadow of the earth" is a quotation from Kepler, dedicated to King Rodolphe II from Paralipomena to Vitellion. Fond National d'Art Contemporain. Frac Occitanie Private collection. |
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