Life on earth exists within a thin, delicate envelope barely thirty kilometers thick: the biosphere. Through “Elysian Fields“, I explore the intermediate layer which separates the terrestrial world from that of the cosmos. This space is in suspension and like the world below, it is not quiet.

For several years, I have been photographing the sky from my airplane seat. Once airborne, between 9 000 and 12 000 meters, the confined space reduces my territory and mobility. The small porthole, coupled with the window of the camera viewfinder, becomes my escape from acrophobia, this irrational fear of heights, or rather, of falling and emptiness.

When photographing a terrestrial landscape, we stop, move forward or back and wait for the perfect light within a careful  composed frame. If the combination of the elements is not satisfactory, we can return at another time and very little will have changed.

In the air, suspended in these seemingly lifeless margins, there is no physical wandering. The plane moves from one place to another, along to a very precise trajectory. It is the landscape that comes to us. Reduced to passivity and contemplation, we dive into a state of hypnosis. Sometimes it's a flat blue sky, other times, it's an immense chaos of meteors whose appearance is constantly shifting. The real journey is the endless loops between the real and the imaginary.

From this vertical axis and looking horizontally (we never see the Earth's surface), nature reveals a variety of shapes, colors, shadows and light. I began this project as a topography of fluctuating surfaces and spaces eventually allowing myself to be immersed in impermanence and the perception of transcendence. “The Poetics of Spaces” - G Bachelard -

The magic, mystery and power of a photograph stem from its inherent incompleteness and the limits of representation. Confronted with “in-finity” and its perpetual transformation there is a tension between the memory of a landscape and the “Equivalent”. In other words, the emotion evoked by abstraction.

Impalpable constructions absorb, overlap, tear or intertwine in forms that seem to reflect my imagination. There is no structure except for the horizon and the frame of my viewfinder. These visions are unconscious resurgences, disturbing landscapes of the sublime or of those shaped by our vanity in attempting to dominate nature. Yet, it is these floating rivers that nourish the Earth and bring life. Like light and darkness, the sky mirrors the duality between an interstitial world and the terrestrial world.

I perceive a certain order and proceed by elimination, determining  the frame and the moment when the unit constitutes a totality sufficient in itself. "Simplicity is complexity resolved " said Brancusi.

To photograph is also to capture disappearance, time and light -  an image that has already ceased to exist and will never return.

There is no ending, only the possibility of new beginnings.

Perhaps the sky is the last refuge of our dreams and anxieties.

Exhibition PIP 

Pingyao - China

09-2023