Often composed like abstract paintings, Jérôme Brézillon's images, beneath an apparent objectivity, deal symbolically with space and emptiness, presence and absence. This empty space seems to be a search for calm and silence, like the image of a road intersection in the middle of snow-covered countryside, set there without any reference to place, coming from nowhere and leading who knows where. Improbable. An abyss of existence that reveals to us the intensity of emptiness. This place turned non-place is also a social observation, about humankind and the space it occupies in the landscape, echoing the photographers of the exhibition "New Topographics," presented by William Jenkins in 1975 at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. The difference is that, beneath this feigned objectivity, Jérôme Brézillon seems in some respects to suggest that the place humankind occupies in the landscape of this vast American expanse is in fact made of traces of its passing, where nature has taken over again. Winner of the Hachette Foundation award and the World Press Masterclass, his work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and is held in the French National Contemporary Art Collection (Fonds national d'art contemporain). First shown in Geneva, his photographs from the series Stand Art Life, taken between 1999 and 2003 from the Deep South of the United States to North Dakota, offer a subtle analysis of our time. Jérôme Brézillon leaves behind an unfinished body of photographic work. He died on March 2, 2012.
