The artist explores the memory of the landscape by superimposing images and traces of time. Through an experimental practice of silver‑gelatin printing, different temporalities meet and converse within a single image. The landscape reveals itself in motion, crossed by what persists, fades, or reappears.
“I am back in the garden, trying to hear the voice of things, to understand where they lead us. Cut flowers, palm tree, plate. And then a few bouquets. Further on, murky water without a horizon, and when I turn my head, that same tree—yet different with every glance—standing before a sky clouded by shifting matter.
I let myself drift for a moment in this strange circle; I am less and less certain I can grasp the direction of things, when suddenly the memory of our conversation returns to me, and I realise I had been searching for a narrative where there was a larger, more obvious story, unfolded before my eyes from the beginning.
Suddenly I can name each element, arrange each chapter: it is a painted nature, a book of painting. A photograph that makes and remakes painting—revisiting it in its entirety. I retrace my steps and before me lies the whole history of images. The chronology itself is there, from the origins.
A frieze of Paleolithic bovids, their procession following a curve carved by water into the relief of the landscape. A basket of fruit escaped from a Pompeian fresco, the unfathomable foliage of the Villa Livia. The predellas of Giotto’s Saint Francis, with its solitary tree rising against a gold background cracked like parched earth. A hand taken from an anatomical study by a Renaissance master. Vanitas. Dutch still lifes. Chardin. Gainsborough. Water lilies. Odilon Redon’s bouquets.
But also the first daguerreotypes. Negative prints and surrealist solarisations. This long movement of painting reaching out to photography has something poignant about it.
To be honest, I do not know in which direction this movement goes: whether it regresses toward the beginnings, or whether it departs from them and brings back to us, in a great backwash, images that make us relive—on a ridge line—the history of painting up to the appearance of the new photographic medium, and up to these very prints here, which seem caught in the fragility of beginnings, not yet detached from their antiquity.
A blazing legend of painted images, relived by photography from within itself.”
