The time of the olives…

July 10 near the village Styra in the south of the island of Euboea in Greece. The fire.

During the summer of 2021 the land burned. Everywhere.
The newspapers made their headlines, governments, NGOs, all analyzed, scrutinized, argued.
But afterwards?
The silence.
What is left?

A month later I passed through the small calcinated valleys of Styra.
In the calm insanity of the blacks and the silvery golds, I quickly understood…

You won’t have an olive next year.

Challenge… One photo every day, but taken in the place of my confinement.
Updated each day of the lockdown…

#Stayhome #COVIDー19 #caretakers #gestebarrier #staysafe #followtherules #

Selection of contemporary art photographs that you can find (or not) enriched in my other galleries of personal works.
My works and my personal researches include images often close to abstraction, but always based on a real base: an existing material or surfaces, identifiable. Absolute abstraction is rarely achieved, that’s my choice. Approaching the border between fantasy and realism is fascinating and playful, associating the imaginary and the real, combining dreams and origins.
Because the light is my painting brush, I like to continue playing, to dream, to look even further…
To drill holes everywhere.

And if light became even paint it? If the night became a dark palette and if I took my camera for a paint brush, a brush, a knife or even a roll. If in the dark of the night everything was really unreal?

If true had – temporarily! – less sense, that my own senses were made of love, surprise, lost but happy by voluntary movements given to my new tool. With so many surprises at the end …

Madam light, I wish you a very good night …

I have often said that I could publish a full book based on a simple bolt. Bolts have turned me on for a long time with their elegant threads, their pretty hex heads (my favorites!), and their free spinning washers! Neither color or light is affecting them, nor water or air: whatever, imperturbable, they lock! Nothing gets away from bolts. Washers and nuts are their accomplices. Together and inseparable, they hold tight, they assemble, and like a predator, they lock their victim through pressure, until suffocation. Ô rude and powerful they look! Ô careless and totaly mechanical they stand! I love the simple and so efficient screw driving action that lead to this permanent locking: one turn, two turns and that is it: all tight! In the darkness of your DIY boxes you stand: silent while ready for action. Ready to assemble you are: it is your dedication, and you do it right. But do not forget that without a spanner you are harmless.

Tuesday night
The continuation of Monday night, with the full of energies …
And if light became even paint it? If the night became a dark palette and if I took my camera for a paint brush, a brush, a knife or even a roll. If in the dark of the night everything was really unreal?
If true had – temporarily! – less sense, that my own senses were made of love, surprise, lost but happy by voluntary movements given to my new tool. With so many surprises at the end …

On Sunday morning, the sun invites itself at home.
Like, almost every day, but the other days I’m not home …
The light that sneaks up on the floor, walls or furniture moves me. Stubborn and volatile, subtle and fleeting. Magnificent! But playfull and shrewd she plays in a slow and inexorable movement, challenging and chasing the shades. She is so confident! Yet the shadows, its old accomplice has fun too and never get caught … They love each other, united, from morning till night they laugh and play at us. With majesty.
Madam light, I wish you a very good day …

This personal work on shadows and their lights took place in August 2006, somewhere in Spain. Strangely enough, the original idea was a research about heat. But, from image to image, it soon became evident that heat could not be represented without light nor shadow. Matter without light, therefore without shadow, is inert, indiscernible. In a void. It becomes difficult, with hindsight, to work out whether a picture registers its visual power to our eyes from its light or its shadows, the boundary between the two being so often difficult to identify. Hence those pictures, are seen and interpreted according to one’s mood and their impact on our mind, filtered by our subconscious, as if emanating in turn from the light, the shadow or the heat. And from the matter!

We were in a country where the days are hot, the nights are mild and starry, sometimes windy. We took full advantage of these moments of tranquility, when the mind is free and traveling. Quiet, we let the time pass, sweet and soft, sneaking. When evening came, the feet in the water, under the shadow of a guitar dabbling a few difficult chords, we looked up at the sky. Then, the clouds, large evanescent ships, carried us away with our dreams.

I like freighters, their raw power together with their relative slowness. I like to look at them on the horizon, coming from nowhere going to somewhere … I feel a real romanticism, a real justification for their presence and their disappearance. They make me dream by their provenances as well as their unknown destinations and their obstinacy to go from one to the other, delivering unsuspected goods. I imagine men, far from home but looking at successive horizons waiting for the next stopover. I know life is not easy on board but they do their jobs relentlessly … stubbornly.

May I have been a lighthouse keeper in another life?