Sébastien Reuzé’s photographs hold a certain mystery—a creative secret that the viewer is not meant to solve, but to interpret. “The image should be received not merely as information, but as a gateway to new possibilities,” says Sébastien Reuzé.
Untitled is a photograph whose intrinsic qualities stem more from a painterly gesture than from a depiction of reality: its composition, the emphasis placed on the use of color—applied in solid blocks or through layering—and the room left for chance, an uncontrolled aspect of the creative process. What is presented to the viewer cannot be defined. A fleeting object, the transience of a movement or a light, a “non-place” in the sense developed by Marc Augé*, as a transitional space.
Alexandra Gillet
* Non-lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, Seuil, Paris, 1992 (collection La librairie du XXIe siècle)
« This brings to the fore the inevitable connections between reality and the photographic image. Sébastien Reuzé photographs what is part of his daily life, what belongs to his own lived reality: the city, travel, and encounters. There is certainly a capture of reality. But even so, it is impossible to classify his photographs as belonging to the documentary or autobiographical genres. Sébastien Reuzé creates a photograph of the interstice, of the in-between space where a shift in perspective occurs within reality. A shift in the sense of contemplation and resistance. Contemplation because the artist’s photography offers the viewer not an objective view of reality, but a floating awareness of the rustlings of life. Since photography mechanically records reality without seeing, Sébastien Reuzé decides to introduce filters similar to those found in dreams. One of these filters begins with a detachment of the gaze from the manifestations of the world and a visual shift toward something else. Fixing one’s gaze is not a matter of seeing without seeing; it is a form of seeing that detaches itself from a visible reality that would absolutely signify reality. A perspective unique to the artist, who works through subtle shifts […]. The other filter lies in the use of easily discernible visual techniques, such as chromatic accents that bathe the panorama of reality in a slight red or blue cast, or the LCD-screen animation of aerial views of various cities illuminated at night. “While these plastic tools may possess aesthetic appeal, they also lend a sense of materiality to the image—that is, they reveal its own visual construction as a photograph that is both rooted in and detached from reality.”
Larys Frogier, Sébastien Reuzé, Constellations, La lettre volée, Bruxelles 2002
Production : La Criée centre d'art contemporain, Rennes
