Sebastien Reuzé: Soleil

In 2016, as he walked the streets of Los Angeles, his mind filled with the views of the city captured by Weegee and Garry Winogrand in the 1950s and 1970s, Sébastien Reuzé decided to keep all identifiable urban forms out of his lens and concentrate solely on the sun.

In a city permeated by the cult of the sun and the counter-culture of the Beat Generation, this one-to-one encounter is essential to capture a vision of the American city that is not so much documentary as sensitive, iconographic and cultural. The result is a series of images whose invariably frontal and centred framing, at times saturated yellow-orange tones and almost abstract renderings are, to varying degrees, part of these different histories of art, science and culture that meet and intersect. These photographs challenge us to a confrontation that, in the age-old tradition of Claude and Turner and in line with the first photograph of 1845, raises the question of the sun as the very condition of the image and the gaze, and envisages their transcendence.

Sébastien Reuzé’s Soleil explores the omnipresence and pervasive beauty of this motif, taking into account its current popular but also exotic and outdated dimensions, and points up its paradoxes. Among other things, these paradoxes can be seen in its objective frontality and artificial-looking tonalities, in the seductive colours and unsettling luminosity, and its popular dimension but with a cultural value. While we are a long way from the natural, atmospheric light effects sought by Claude and Turner, or the greyish but precise renderings of the 1845 photograph, this 2016 sun refers us back to them through the dazzlement it provokes and the realistic yet sublimated and imaginary nature of the reality it conveys. (Véronique Souben)