Disorders and Reflections

Would symmetry be no more than the figure itself of immediation, failure, death and sterility, as Roland Barthes wrote it, in a romantic and modernist spirit ? Could it not rather be a privileged vector for a critical reflection on the image and its seductions ?

The theme of this work is classical symmetry, whose aim is to bring closure and order to a disordered world through a basic operation of mirroring. Let us behold an image that would just be chaos : a fragment of photograph, still the passive capture of an aspect of the world with no aesthetic intent, and let us assemble it with its mirror duplication along a vertical axis. A transfiguration happens where a wholly new space is created, a scene where all the traps and deceits of image-making get full play.

Eschewing the easy and empty impact of symmetrical imagery, we take it as a still very alive cultural symbol, and a critical device, subverting with irony the empire of the image.

Creation of an architecture where orientation and scale marks get overthrown.

from a material of formal chaos, creation of an illusory order.

With this series of images I did reflect on symmetry in a text (in french) : DESORDRES ET REFLEXIONS

Some of those works were presented in 2014 at Zedes Art Gallery in Brussels.