Pretty
Noise

I come from photography, and I haven't stopped making photographs — I've just stopped needing a camera.

For twenty years my practice has been built around a single obsession: controlling what the viewer sees, and what remains in shadow. Light as selection. Darkness as suspense.

Pretty Noise continues that practice through new means. The raw material is LiDAR scan data from the IGN — France's national geographic institute — released openly for administrative purposes. I take this neutral, bureaucratic topography and charge it. Cone lights, atmospheric layers, editorial framing: the land becomes a stage. The IGN data gives the terrain its truth. My light gives it a story.

The work operates on two scales simultaneously. From a distance, a painting — mood, drama, atmosphere. Up close, a document — every ridge, every slope, real coordinates. The viewer steps back to take in the whole, then moves forward to lose themselves in it, hunting for detail. The image holds both distances at once.