The islands thief (Islands of desire cycle) - 2021/present
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From fascination, the viewer can move to
the desire, ultimately, to cut up the work.
Daniel Arasse, The Detail.
This work found its genesis in my research and readings. First there was the etymology of the word "isolate" which refers us to "separate like an island (isola)". I then discovered that geographer Guy Mercier, to answer the difficult question of defining an island, proposed: "the only way would be to make it a limiting concept; reduce the island to its zero degree by considering it as a total isolate, a geographical unit completely cut off from the world that surrounds it". Finally, it was art historian Daniel Arasse who helped me find the framework for this series.
In The Detail. For a Close History of Painting, Arasse cites the fascination that an island, a simple detail in The Fall of Icarus by Hans Bol, exerted on a 17th-century Flemish artist, before developing the idea that "from fascination, the viewer can move to the desire, ultimately, to cut up the work". This is followed by examples of paintings thus cut up, such as The Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine (Lorenzo Lotto, 1523), victim of a soldier and art amateur who "under the charm of the landscape that appeared through a window, cut it out of the painting. (...) This practice of pleasurable cutting was undoubtedly linked to the development of private consumption of artworks".
The series The Islands thief revisits "this practice of pleasurable cutting" from the Renaissance by applying it to the field of contemporary photography. I photograph islands from the continent, from other islands or even from the sea. They are either the main, even unique, motif of the works or a simple detail of the landscape. And then I cut directly into the prints to extract them. From one photograph I thus obtain two: a sea amputated of its Atlantis and an island orphaned from its sea.
Upon seeing these works thus desecrated, the viewer might wonder who this collector-pirate is who scours museums and galleries only to steal islands? It could well be my fictional double. An artist of the scalpel who suffers from islomania, this "rare affliction of the mind" and tropism that Lawrence Durrell invented to describe those for whom "islands are somehow irresistible". The purpose of this pirate is moreover to create an ideal archipelago bringing together all the stolen islands, each carefully framed like promised lands.
The works presented were created during an artist residency in 2024 for the Festival Planches Contact