Temps Présent 17th of February 2023

TEMPS PRÉSENT

PHOTOGRAPHING THE HORIZON OF THE WORLD

When photography appeared, it quietly freed painting from its duty to document reality, allowing it to become a field of sensations, vibrations and lived time. A century and a half ago, painters left their studios to work outdoors, capturing not only landscapes but the very duration of their presence before them. Today I ask myself: how might photography answer that same intuition, that urge to go beyond the still image?

In January 2023, on the Normandy coast, I pointed my large-format camera at the horizon, thinking of Renoir’s Sunset, View of Guernsey, never suspecting that it would steer my work toward what I now call “realistic abstraction.” Sky and sea became my subjects: a matter that holds visible time.

From sunrise to sunset, I recorded every change, adjusting exposure, aperture and shutter speed to let in an even light. The blue of dawn, the white of noon, the violet of dusk: each carried the same weight. Temps Présent answers a silent question, “What color was the sky today?”, a question that quietly unravels the myth of a single, stable reality.

This somatic vision of color, which gives every moment the same weight, is both performative and meditative. The resulting images are fields of color born in the darkroom, hues that never existed on their own in nature. They hold the invisible events of the day: reflections, clouds, waves, boats, passers-by, all present yet leaving no trace. The image becomes a palimpsest of the invisible.