Depix

Four composite portraits made by superimposing several photographed faces, thus creating a new fictitious face. The composition is made in digital post-production, by assembling Photoshop layers. To generate these layers, the first step was to photograph a tarpaulin with a pixelated camouflage pattern – the type used by paramilitary groups. Each of the five pixelated colours of the camouflage was then isolated to create a corresponding layer for each person’s face. Thus, the part of a woman’s portrait corresponding to the khaki pixels is superimposed on the part of another woman’s portrait corresponding to the brown pixels, and so on for the other colours. Through this protocol, Depix evokes the collective nature of the villagers’ resistance, as well as a displacement of the struggle onto the territory of digital networks.

Apariciones

The forty or so night shots in this series were taken in almost complete darkness with a Minox infrared hunting camera. The series addresses the imagination of the communities – the daily fear, a life never far away from death – trying to transform these experiences into tales close to their traditions, and to the Colombian sense of “magic realism”. Overexposing the eyes and the skin as well as the vegetation, the infrared flash makes the facial features of the villagers unrecognizable, and tends to blend them into their environment. The photographs are meant to be printed on glass sheets, displayed on shelves either individually or in friezes whose composition can vary.

VOCES DISTANTES

Eleven videos (approximately 1 mn 40 each) in which the villagers film the artist reading their texts in the landscapes planted with the species they have chosen to represent them in the Cuerpos Y Plantas and Mascaras series. Most of them are still in post-production:

Voz de Gabo
Video, 1 mn 32, 2020

Voz de Agua,
Video, 1 mn 44, 2020

Voz de Patricia
Video, 1 mn 39, 2020

CUERPOS Y PLANTAS

Community members are portrayed through photographs of a part of their body and a plant from their biotope which they ask to represent them. Counting from one to three images, these eighteen “environmental portraits” include handwritten texts signed under aliases, in which the villagers express their commitments and fears. Images and statements (the later on original fabric or in the form of a photographic edition) are presented as polyptychs.

MASCARAS

Fractal Table

(2018 – … )

«  On this industrial drafting table, what is unfolding as a rhizome is indeed the territory of the work, constantly moving between words and images. »

Héloïse Conesa, conversation for The Photocaptionist, August 2019

Centrepiece of the Fractal Factory exhibition at Galerie Binome (2018), Fractal Table #01 was conceived as a prototype: an old industrial drawing table discarded by a mirror maker on which a table top covered with a steel sheet was adapted. As in photo labs, prints and transparencies can therefore be held by magnets, superimposed on mirrors. Evolutive – five successive versions were exhibited – and potentially mobile, the piece seeks to blur the boundaries between studio, exhibition furniture and installation.

Although it was created in connection with the Fractal Spaces series, it is open to the reinterpretation of other bodies of work – images, texts, archives – relating to the societal and environmental upheavals brought about by globalisation. The transformation of this obsolete furniture from the industrial era into a sculptural piece calls up different references: the lecterns of pre-digital libraries as well as the control consoles of factory lines or the multiple windows of computer screens. On the table space, images and texts are linked, refracted by the mirrors, and contextualised by the reflections of the exhibition space and of the moving visitors.

Fractal Spaces

(2013 - 2019)

Fractal Spaces is a body of photographs of peri-urban landscapes mounted on mirrors, exploring our changing relationship to nature and industry in the capitalocene era. Most of the images were taken at the end of the winter of 2016 in the Rhône Valley, the most industrialised region in France, during a residency at Moly Sabata, Albert Gleizes Foundation, at the invitation of Le Creux de l'enfer contemporary art center. The viewpoints - through budding tree branches - suggest that these images talk less about ruin than about mutation.

The Fractal Spaces landscapes mimic the established codes of topographic photography in order to subvert them: industrial parks, suburban housing and commercial developments are captured from a distance, under a neutral grey sky and without human figures. These contemporary stereotypes are reinterpreted through two forms of superposition.

The first one, the curtain of trees in front of the built-up background, reverses the perspective: it is not, as in the usual topographic photography, an altered nature that is being observed by man, but rather nature that is watching over threatened industrial spaces. A non-anthropocentric point of view questioning deindustrialization, and landscape mutations generated by a network economy in which we relate to the world through tree-like fractal structures.

At the post-production phase, a second effect is introduced by the mounting of transparent prints on mirror. The reflection of the vegetation and architecture in the mirror's shading, on different planes, invites a reading that is more specular than documentary. The pieces are activated by the viewer, who is invited to situate himself in relation to the images and the reality they reflect. It is thus an attempt to blur the divide between nature and culture, viewer and landscape, subject and object.


Related Documents


ESSAYS AND CONVERSATIONS

2022
Jean-Charles Vergne, text for Le promontoire du songe, exhibition catalogue, FRAC Auvergne

2021
Fares Chalabi Des cristaux et des masques – sur la photographie cristalline et fabulatoire de Marc Lathuillière”
TK-21.com

2019
Text-image portfolio and conversation with Héloïse Conesa, curator at the BnF
"Refracting"
The Photocaptionist

PUBLICATIONS

2022
Le promontoire du songe, catalogue, FRAC Auvergne

2020
Quelque chose noir, catalogue, Galerie Gradiva

Exhibitions