Elements – Curator Matthieu Gafsou

From 24 October to 28 November 2015, Gallerie Eric Mouchet will present the exhibition Elements, giving ‘carte blanche’ to the photographer and curator Matthew Gafsou.

Elements brings together photographers Mathieu Bernard-Reymond, Benoît Jeannet and Benoît Vollmer, who each explore the landscape genre.

Dominant in artistic photography during the mid-70s, this subject lost momentum at the turn of the 21st century. The advent of the internet, the elimination of geographic distances, the abundance of images and the increase in tourism, founded a new era where the photographic representation of nature became banalized and commonplace.

Landscape nonetheless remains an essential part of photography and more generally of pictorial art. Thus, the exhibition Elements, curated by Matthew Gafsou, launches a reflection on the future of the photographic representation of nature and its composite elements, thanks to the experimental and conceptual vision of these three artists: Mathieu Bernard-Reymond, Benoît Jeannet and Benoît Vollmer.

In line with changes in technology we observe in the here and now, the three photographers experiment with the photographic medium to produce an effect of movement, which comes from the scrambling of the codes of landscape representation. A dreamlike and supernatural universe emerges from this endangering of the reference point.

The connection of photographs to the pictorial landscape genre nonetheless demonstrates the strength of the form. The evolution passes through a discourse that is no longer sociological, urbanist or geographical, but that questions our instinctive relation to what comes from the outside.