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Description

For a very long time I have been interested in models, miniatures, what can be done with them when they are staged.
The retrospective of James Casebere at the House der kunst in Munich in 2016 particularly interested me, as did the models by Chris Burden exhibited at the MAC in Marseille and
the photographs of the stagings by Gilbert Garcin. These small worlds, where the artist controls everything, sees everything, encompasses everything, echo my interest in cartography,
a reduction of the world for immobile travellers. For some time, accumulating books on the theme of islands, I wanted to create images of utopian places where architecture, heritage,
would be engulfed by vegetation. Being limited by my technical capacities in computer graphics, I did not cross the Rubicon.
In September 2021, something clicked. Using the building materials at my disposal, a bit of plaster, extruded polystyrene and my mobile phone,
I created a sketch that touched me and was an illusion. Something came to the surface, images from the depths of my childhood, my first photographs taken at the age of 10 with a Soviet camera,
shots of model planes, miniatures, small reed huts. .. But something else was happening, the aquatic world, the water. “The sea was over there in the reservoir of my memory” as John Fante wrote.
These islands detached and separated from the rest of the world, located in a geography that is both real and fictional, these places conducive to reconstruction,
now offer me a new form of escape, between reality and invention. Everything falls into place in this research to delight me because suddenly my loves for travel, heritage, geography
the Mediterranean basin and color unite in realistic, plausible images.

Description

For a very long time I have been interested in models, miniatures, what can be done with them when they are staged.
The retrospective of James Casebere at the House der kunst in Munich in 2016 particularly interested me, as did the models by Chris Burden exhibited at the MAC in Marseille and
the photographs of the stagings by Gilbert Garcin. These small worlds, where the artist controls everything, sees everything, encompasses everything, echo my interest in cartography,
a reduction of the world for immobile travellers. For some time, accumulating books on the theme of islands, I wanted to create images of utopian places where architecture, heritage,
would be engulfed by vegetation. Being limited by my technical capacities in computer graphics, I did not cross the Rubicon.
In September 2021, something clicked. Using the building materials at my disposal, a bit of plaster, extruded polystyrene and my mobile phone,
I created a sketch that touched me and was an illusion. Something came to the surface, images from the depths of my childhood, my first photographs taken at the age of 10 with a Soviet camera,
shots of model planes, miniatures, small reed huts. .. But something else was happening, the aquatic world, the water. “The sea was over there in the reservoir of my memory” as John Fante wrote.
These islands detached and separated from the rest of the world, located in a geography that is both real and fictional, these places conducive to reconstruction,
now offer me a new form of escape, between reality and invention. Everything falls into place in this research to delight me because suddenly my loves for travel, heritage, geography
the Mediterranean basin and color unite in realistic, plausible images.