“When Jean-Luc Dorchies invited me, as part of Figure Imposée, to record the valleys of the Thouarsais, it became obvious to me, long before I started scouting, that I had to offer something other than a simple collection of picturesque views made of narrow bocage valleys, serpentine watercourses, sylvan banks, Romanesque bridges and other small chapels, mills and dikes. For someone engaged in work on the rendering of the contemporary landscape as we shape it, inhabit it and often neglect it, such an enumeration could at first seem daunting, even if it brought me back to a few recurring pages of my own career, more marked by research on the metaphorical dimension of landscape, the contemplative approach and the question of the Sublime.

That particularly picturesque dimension was confirmed from the very first locations, which revealed to me an ancient landscape — a term I prefer to authentic — whose possible rendering immediately refers to an imagination of landscape painting.”