Les ombres du monde

Empty scenes full of stories.

The play of shadow and light is at the heart of this work: the sets are empty, the actors absent, the atmosphere is mysterious. The light guides the eye towards a central, symbolic element. The shadow, around the edges, hides the setting and pushes the viewer to imagine. What happened? What is about to happen? Clues, never solutions: the candlestick is in the room, Colonel Mustard stays aside.

The series follows on from Hitchcock. In the meantime, the practice had turned towards landscape and a more documentary approach. After the first exhibition, LVDV, a gallery owner offered a show at Galerie 29 in Évian, in 2019: a few new images were then made to complete the series. The aesthetic stays the same, but the panorama technique makes it possible to print large while keeping a high level of detail. The largest image measures 180 × 100 cm.

The field also widens. Where Hitchcock showed farms, street corners, phone boxes, the new images look at fields and power lines. Natural light comes into the frame. At first entirely fictional, the series becomes hybrid and starts a reflection on the French landscape, especially on the edges of towns: how we organise the territory, what we do to it.

The title comes from a song by Téléphone.