STILL LIFE

​

What I know about this proliferating series: they are portraits galleries. What I don't know for sure: portraits of whom? Or portraits of what? Some are obviously emanations from literature, legend, mythology. Where did I see them? Wherever a certain light that I recognize falls on certain objects that transform under this lighting, for if it is not guaranteed that objects have a soul of their own, we may estimate that they at least have ours, if by chance we are provided with it.

​

Most of the time these characters are je-ne-sais-quoi, something, "incomprehensible monsters", as Blaise Pascal said, leaning on his fellow men and on himself. Unreasonable, chimerical figures, hauntings, grotesques... The routine when you have practiced a lot Hieronymus Bosch during your youth, approached Füssli, accompanied Goya, followed William Blake, pursued Odilon Redon, ran after Francis Bacon, and when, moreover, you are aggregated with an indecipherable self, because it does not exist and because what you have instead is the mirage of an identity, shadows all broken up, opaque reflections, a blind spot. Threat, anguish and grotesque, I suppose these images are a kind of interior report, the materialization of an inner state projected on to external subjects, because we haven’t invented yet the brain sabbath recording machine. We only found the way to get out of it by giving to this saraband a particular form, artistic for example, without always understanding how, both by what we know how to do and by what we do not know how to do. These are suppositions, restrictions, uncertainties, deficiencies that don't hurt a photographer. I do not see the point of an art – of an aesthetic conversion of obsessions and torments – which would not be, to one degree or another, autonomous, accidental, monstrous and, within the limits of reason, incomprehensible. The enigma is quite often a better explanation than any explanation.

​

“You must not desire things that are done to be done the way you want, but you must want them to be done the way they happen. »

​

It's in Pascal, too.