The artist explores the memory of the landscape by superimposing images and traces of time. Through an experimental practice of silver gelatin printing, different temporalities meet and converse within a single image. The landscape is revealed in motion, traversed by what persists, fades away, or reappears.

“I am back in the garden, trying to hear the voice of things, to understand where they are leading us. Cut flowers, palm tree, plate. And then a few bouquets. Further away, a muddy water, without horizon, and, turning my head, the same tree, yet different at each glance, against a sky obscured by shifting matter. For an instant I let myself be carried along by this strange circular movement; I am increasingly unsure of being able to grasp the direction of things, when suddenly the memory of our conversation comes back to me and I realise that I was seeking a narrative where there was a broader, obvious story, unfolded before my eyes from the beginning. Suddenly I can name each of its elements, arrange every chapter: it is a painted nature, a book of painting. A photograph that makes and remakes painting—that retraces its entire course. I retrace my steps and I have before me the whole history of images. Chronology itself is there, since the origins. A frieze of Palaeolithic bovids, their procession following a curve carved by water in the relief of the landscape. A basket of fruit escaped from a Pompeian fresco, the impenetrable foliage of the Villa Livia. Predella panels of Giotto’s Saint Francis, with its solitary tree rising against a cracked gold background like a dried‑out land. A hand extracted from an anatomical study by a master of the Renaissance. Vanitas. Dutch still lifes. Chardin. Gainsborough. Water lilies. Bouquets by Odilon Redon. But also the first daguerreotypes. Negative prints and surrealist solarisations. That long movement of painting that reaches out to photography has something poignant about it. In truth, I do not know in which direction this movement is going: whether it is sliding back toward the beginnings or, rather, starting from them and bringing us, in a great surge, images that make us relive, along a crest line, the history of painting up to the appearance of the new photographic medium—and up to the proofs that are here, which seem taken in the fragile beginnings, not yet detached from their antiquity. A fulgurant legend of painted images relived by photography, within itself.”

Excerpt from the text by Bertrand Schefer

Book published in the INSTANTS collection, with the support of Château Palmer

Limited edition of 500 numbered copies (accompanied by a small unique original print, 3 × 5 cm, pasted at the end of the book) and 10 special artist’s copies accompanied by a unique print (15 × 20 cm).