PHOTOGRAPHY

LA QUIÉTUDE DU LITTORAL
(THE QUIETNESS OF THE COASTLINE)

SOLO EXHIBITION AT THE LÉONARD-PARENT ART GALLERY
June 8 to July 14, 2023, Rimouski, Quebec

« The purpose of art is to extract us from our daily reality, to lead us to a hidden and difficult to access truth. »
Abbas Kiarostami (Iranian film director, screenwriter and producer)

A call to slow down.
A call to walk alone.
A call to respectful and intuitive observation.

Photographing and drawing the aspects of nature that intuitively attract us makes our artistic activity a personal expression, and a deep creative flowering; we co-create with the subject that fascinates us. In this way, our creative activity is relational and draws us into a closer union with nature.

This work, through the creative gesture, magnifies the initially invisible aspects of nature where two ecosystems are artistically explored using criteria such as luminosity, contrast, color, atmosphere and geometry.

Nature is the great creative workshop of its own works and photography is the ideal tool for capturing and reinterpreting these works. This is not a mechanical representation of what nature produces. Nature is rather associated with my creative process in which I favor aesthetic validity.

The project is divided into two parts of coastal explorations:

1 — Shoreline dynamics

Several years of photographing the northern landscape as a whole drew my attention to the infinitely small. My approach, although representative, becomes more abstract and opens onto a visual universe that is at first sight invisible, but already inscribed in the elements.

Fiction is based on the existence of a real world, we evaluate each image from our own experiential memory.

Let our conscience
and our attention slip
from resemblance to resemblance,
from analogy to analogy,
from emotion to emotion.

2 — In the riparian forest

Let's meet after a rain in the riparian forest that runs along the coast. We hear and see life in the forest, the branches and trunks of the trees are bright, colorful, the mosses and lichens that coexist on the trees are waterlogged, their colors are saturated.

My attention becomes contemplative, I resonate with the elements and a world is revealed to my lens. In the stillness, a visual narration imposes itself on my mind. And I will want to come back again and again after the rain to bathe in this atmosphere.

The columnar wall arrangement acts here as a metaphor for the forest. Seen from a distance, they are trunks and branches. Up close, the many variations appear. This series, by its coherence, highlights the artistic variability of shapes, textures and colors present on the trunks and branches of trees.

Bend down on the microcosm
and you will see the macrocosm
around which will turn the seasons
and you won't have to travel long distances
to find wonder.
(Marcel Jomphe)