Nature in Exile_I will plant TREES series

I will plant TREES_specimen_discovery, 250x158cm

I will plant TREES_roses and leaves decay, 296x65cm

I will plant TREES_as it used to be, 250x180cm

I will plant TREES_leaves on tiles_audience, 250x180cm

Nature in exile

I love these quiet moments at the corner café, a teh Tarik on the Formica table... the ceiling fan spitting out puffs of air... warm despite its creaking efforts... nothing seems to be in a hurry. Even the ballet of the waiters seems to slow down, the tropical plants suffocate in their concrete tubs, the birds, so playful as usual, have taken refuge in the silence and shade of the trees... the impression of living at the pace of nature, certainly, but urban and cramped. Eros and Thanatos mixed together, the laws of nature are certainly unjust and unequal, written to survive but not to dominate. We’ve imitated the worst of it, and it’s deep down inside us. We have long believed ourselves to be above this rebellious nature. Overlooking it, dominating it. We’ve potted her up and put her in a zoo, a circus like a muse- um that reassures us that we’re not so bad. But nature resists, bursting in where we least expect it, resisting with despair, fighting without limit against the concrete that oppresses it, creating an aesthetic of despair and suffering. Emergences of life that become sacred. These thin, perennial streams speak of a present that sounds the death knell of a not-so-distant harmonious past. We exist, these apparitions tell us, even in the exodus to unwelcoming lands where we’ll have to resist and survive.

Nature, an inexhaustible reservoir of knowledge. Knowledge of how to live, how to resist, how to die and how to be reborn.
Caged here, these fragile elements of nature deserve these bright, acid colors, even if artificial. Nature that we have so much fragmented and even humiliated. These cages and these colors are like respect for its irreducible beauty, its indomitable pride and, hopefully, its invincibility. The greedy, arrogant human being should take inspiration from natural predators who respect their preys, knowing that their disappearance would condemn them to extinction. And we end up being amazed that there’s still a moon shining brightly at night, stubbornly circling around us - a moon that has no life of its own and surely regrets it to the point of keeping a close eye on the wanderings, gestic- ulations and whims of these spoiled earthlings. it also reminds us that the immensity of the cosmos is far “beyond human”.

 

12 roses on coloured tiles, 250x100cm

17 leaves, 175x215cm

when they no longer have a name, nature in exile_#3, 150x150cm

when they no longer have a name, nature in exile_#5, 150x150cm

departure_C, nature in exile_#5, 200x200cm

departure_G, nature in exile_#5, 200x200cm

Nature in exile_All is fine.

It’s in photography’s DNA to glorify neither surface nor volume. Its irremediable 2-dimensional nature makes it dependent on the subjects photographed, with no escape from either matter or relief. And then there’s the frame, always a bit of an intruder, giving the printed image a thickness that can’t be taken for granted.

- The frame is a surface that sometimes dilutes, other times magnifies what it surrounds, from which it can no longer be distinguished. Frames, grids, squares... lists and enumerations... more questions than answers. Images in photography are above all silences, as if in struggle with the subject’s chatter.
- In bathrooms and laboratories, wherever cleanliness is essential, we find these inexpressive, neutral tiles, barely present, which strangely, maliciously provide the image, when confronted with them, with a kind of dignity that makes some escape from their sober neutrality for some and from their arrogant extraversion for other. So far from the surface, even further in time.

- Images, like a stroll, a little lost in the surface that seems to welcome them. Images, colors, frames, a celebration of the insignificant, the overlooked, the glimpse here or there that we’ve taken the time to jot down in a little mechanical moleskin notebook. To remember the mood of the moment.
- Uncertain memory, these pieces of time that have no other link than to have become images, witnesses of a passage, objects of a blurred reverie... perhaps simply a poetry of the uncertain, the vague, the un- deserving and that never tires of any slowness. No fantasies, little ego... photographing, transporting a cumbersome “me” that distorts everything.

- Uncertain memory, fleeing the grandiose and spectacular, taking notes and not really knowing what to do with them, like unanswered questions to be put aside for better days. And from far, far away, nature intrudes, inviting itself, everywhere in exile, but resisting as if in search of home.

nature in exile_post it suite, 200x200cm