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AGAVES

Le projet AGAVES est un recueil photographique, un brin poétique. Il regroupe des images d’agaves en fleurs — les agaves sont en fleurs lorsqu’elles meurent. J’ai donc foulé le pourtour méditerranéen pour les photographier et enregistrer leur ultime instant sur Terre.
Ce projet à pris la forme d’un livre.  

(ENG) This book is a collection of photographs, with a hint of poetry. It documents the agaves americana found in the Mediterranean area.

>>> Acheter un exemplaire du livre

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Cette Vue Que Je N’aurai Plus

Installation, Photography & Screen Printing

« Cette vue que je n’aurai plus » is a work dealing with my relationship to time, especially with the present.
How can I experience it, between fugacity and elasticity?

This relationship to time is expressed through places that are subject of contemplation. I always maintain a physical connection with these places — which I sometimes pass through like the mountain, or contemplate like the sea.
Always remaining close to the idea of the sublime.

Most of the time the view is obstructed. I push the audience to lift up a kind of shroud overlaying the images, in order to discover what they actually represent. The sentences layering and printed over the images are acting also as vail by the mental image they are producing. I wrote these text as some sort of Haïku, always linked to the present through the meteorological and physical elements they contain.
Therefore, a dialogue is being made between the mental image create by the text and the actual printed image.

I like the idea of being active in front of the images, and not only be in passive contemplation. As well as having an active presence in these places and feel what is happening there.
What are the images suggesting? What kind of emotions are generated? What sensations are they bringing?

And thus, stretching the time to counter the idea that sometimes time can slip through our fingers.

 

Exhibition view, Graduation Show 2020 – Ensad Paris

 

Cette vue que je n’aurai plus, full series, 2020

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When the Mountain took the Place of my Father – The Book

Limited editions of 100 books, self-publication by the artist in 2019, 40x27x1,5 cm

 

« When the mountain took the place of my father » is a praise to my father through the personification of the mountains, treated in portrait.

In 2017, my family and I walked the Tour of the Mont Blanc. Two years after my father’s died. During 4 days of hiking, I took pictures of the mountains, summits and peaks that surrounded us.

When I came back and looked at the images I had made, I realized that somehow the mountain had healed us. It had given us a direction, a path to go to. We could eventually move forward.

These mountains were standing in front of us like monuments, gradually embodying the portrait of my late father who, in a way, would never disappear.

For me, portraying a non-human figure is a way to deal with the idea of Landscape – the experience of landscapes. In a different way, it is to get closer to the concept of the milieu, where our presence and the feeling of the atmosphere become inseparable from that place.

 

 

“This is about my father.
This about the mountain
— The idea of Sublime.

This is about feeling alive after facing death.

This is about something tough to reach.
This is about preserving and triggering memories.
—The idea of the impossible”

 

Here, the presentation of the photographs of this project.

 

To purchase the book, please send me an e-mail (contact(at)victoireeouzan.com)

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When the mountain took the place of my father

Photographs & Silkscreen, 2017-2019

 

« When the mountain took the place of my father » is a praise to my father through the personification of the mountains, treated in portrait.

In 2017, my family and I walked the Tour of the Mont Blanc. Two years after my father’s died. During 4 days of hiking, I took pictures of the mountains, summits and peaks that surrounded us.

When I came back and looked at the images I had made, I realized that somehow the mountain had healed us. It had given us a direction, a path to go to. We could eventually move forward.

These mountains were standing in front of us like monuments, gradually embodying the portrait of my late father who, in a way, would never disappear.

For me, portraying a non-human figure is a way to deal with the idea of Landscape – the experience of landscapes. In a different way, it is to get closer to the concept of the milieu, where our presence and the feeling of the atmosphere become inseparable from that place.

 

“This is about my father.
This about the mountain
— The idea of Sublime.

This is about feeling alive after facing death.

This is about something tough to reach.
This is about preserving and triggering memories.
—The idea of the impossible”

 

Here, the book about this project

 

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Mountain Portrait

Analog photographs, C-print, 100×66 cm,  2018

It was winter 2014, and this was the first time I took a photograph of a mountain. It was very cold. I was standing at the cliff’s edge.
The Massif des Écrins, in the French Alps, was covered by a thick layer of snow; the image was very sweet, voluptuous, and sharp at the same time. It looked like an ocean of untouched snow ripped by the rock.

I never stopped taking photographs of mountains since this winter. Since then, every year, I went back there to add pictures to the library I started. What’s fascinating about mountains?

A few years later, in 2017, I’ve hiked around the Mont Blanc; during 5 days the sun was almost burning. Every time I passed over ridges, I discovered a new face of the “Top of the Europe”.

How can I grasp and appreciate the idea of mountain? To be on the mountain surrounded by such a grandeur?

It might be at this time that the idea of portraying a mountain popped-up to my mind. To me, this might be a way to embrace the idea of mountain and the experience you can have up there. I photographed each peak I was about to reach, and then, I turned myself back facing the other side and shot it. I tried to capture which seemed to be elusive.

But what if, instead of being photographs, those images could trigger memories?

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M i l i e u *

Booklet, hand binded, editions of 30, 20x26x1,5 cm, 2018

 

In French “milieu” means the way you perceive the environment, and surroundings.
It also means two contradictory things at the same time: the middle of something, and something entirely as well.

I arrived in Amsterdam in August 2017.
I had never been there before. I had no clue what I was going to find and experience over there.

How to discover a city you’ve never been before?
How to make picture of a new place, without making a cliché of it?

They are all places that remind me of others.

 

Full series

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Incidences

Project Incidences, 2016-2018

Incidences, silver print contact on Baryta paper, 11x15cm, 2017

The initial idea was to make images from the litophane : eighteenth century technique that produces bas-relief images on porcelain with a back-lighting system.

I decided to adapt this technique to the 3D printer. Therefore, I create a sample to test the item’s transparency (small white PLA target, 4 levels of thickness). By testing the item I find a singular interest for the thread it produces, once enlarged. The idea is to make images based on this item by silver-based printing.

The verification process is on its way : contact printing, then enlargement. The accident on the item (a tear) opens the possibles field : the verification item becomes the experimentation item. We enter the matter, we discover a landscape. Scale is muddled.

The images have different status : search for a sign (small format), search for a landscape (medium and large formats).