Artist
Statement
The digital
production I consider cannot and doesn't have to be conceived as a single
pure media. Unlike artists who work exclusively on and through the Web
the following works exist out of the digital system they originally come
from.
First, I try to suggest a virtual and augmented naturalistic reality which
refers to the beginnings of photography ( esthetics of the Pictorialism
) and which at the same time reveals a contemporary idea of our environment
where disorder sometimes dominates... Inondations, storms, hurricanes.
We are partly responsible for all these unsettled states.
Technically
speaking, the event which took place isn't anymore something which "
has been " but something which "will be". The key point
is that there's always a kind of flash forward (wait and see what's possible
to do after the shooting ) and then a flash back to our familiar environment....
That's why why we can speak about a realistic anticipation.
For example, this is what happened on my first work, which is the result
of several journeys in Sologne and Brittany: I was stuck by a feeling
of calm and serenity which radiated from these landscapes.
However, they were only illusions. A bird from time to time, wind in the
trees. I had the strange impression that the landscapes looked the same
to me: it was also possible to easily get lost in the captivating loops
of the rivers. Then I chose to treat these landscapes as collages to convey
the feeling of disorder... How to make these illusions reappear... The
pictures could be easily superimposed (the two rivers # 2): Nature was
sublimated. After, the calm and the serenity found themselves treated
separately, in different contexts: "
The Pool " : it was a single event : Catching the landscape's quintessence
(unicity, a way to reveal what Walter Benjamin called "
the aura " ) was more important than thinking about the factors of
appropriation and expansion (multiplicity, what becomes " the aura
"
if you consider that kind of digital processing and moreover when there's
this sort of collages ) : A pool and a boat were there, right under my
eyes, the wind didn't blow. On the other hand, the violence was based
on a single event: the sea which breaks out refers directly to environments
of the end of the 19th century. This same violence provides a contrast
with the icy beauty of "The sea and the castle"
and of "Our silver lake '".
"Where
is the sun " was released in april 2006 Beyond the purely formal
apect (absence of light in some scenes), this work bears my
ownhallmarks: like the ebb and flow of the sea, my heart always weighed
in between somewhere peace and fury. Last year, I never really saw the
light. Nature was being ransacked right before our eyes. These houses
and shelters being destroyed ( Our little house), Death which carries
us off (The forest and the death: meeting between an apocalyptic atmosphere
and a mourning .) The last photograph foreshadows the following work:
"with tired eyes, we need a mask" more his autobiographical
value than its aesthetics.
www.lotus-mineral.com
Simon
P Laurent
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sales, commissions and to send comments to the artist.
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