Ce que je cache

The human footprint on the landscape.

For twenty years my practice has been built around a single obsession: a dialogue between light and shadow, the explicit and the implicit. Between the stated and the feared.

Ce que je cache (What I Hide) continues that practice through new means. Like my earlier series, these landscapes are empty of human presence — and yet something has clearly happened, or is about to. But the crime isn't just around the corner anymore.

What if the victim is right under my own feet? What if I am witnessing a crime of which I am the perpetrator? What if I was the victim, the judge and the savior all at once?

State of shock.

The time feels suspended before the void and the terror. The mountain doesn't move. Not for one. Here I oscillate between contemplation and overwhelm. Dissociation sets in — that particular state where I watch the world, fully present and utterly powerless. Spectator of the despair.

My practice consists of constructing seductive images, ones that lay the foundations of a nascent narrative, but leave vast sections unfilled, onto which each viewer projects their own story to produce a complete narration. I conceive my works as a starting point for reflection: a theme approached through seduction rather than demonstration, convinced that an image one wants to keep looking at works more deeply than one that explains.

Three axes structure this work. Anthropization first: I seek to show the impact of human presence on the surrounding landscape, our relationship with nature. My images are emptied of human figures, but always punctuated, at minimum, by a structure, by something of human origin. Narrative next: shadow treated as a space of freedom for the viewer. And finally, danger: those sensations of pursuit or flight, embodied in the play of light, and especially that halo, searching and threatening.