The sea at work, 2020 shooting Aimée Fleury

An inkjet of a cliff onto a canvas below.

The fall of the ink and the aspect of the ground form the imprint of this vertical earth which captures from the mountain its vertigo and its fall, its geological time and its limitless space.

The realization of the canvas is as fast as the fall of a dozen meters that put a few drops of coal mixed with water.

Before being a work of art, Ecotopia is the result of many walks, alone or with friends through the mountains. Nights spent living in nature, under the stars, warmed by a campfire.

Cliffs climbed for hours on end, only to have an ink jet cover a canvas below in a few seconds.

Except for the linen canvas itself, the materials that make it up come from walking, the ink is created after nights spent outside, with the crushed ashes of the wood fire, to which is added a sap serving as a binder.

The fertile mountain gives birth to the substrate which is deposited on the canvas, the wood which grows on it becomes charcoal, then ink.

English vocal introduction:

Photographs from the Nouvelle Vagues exhibition – Find out more about the exhibition

Ecotopia continued in France with mountain climbing in the Mercantour massif and in the no less perilous southern pre-Alps.

Vision of the sublime in Kant, the mountain exceeds the capacity of the human mind to think it, to represent it. This is how the artist’s gesture disappears to let its formal singularities express themselves.

With a meditative Zen élan, she recalls the approach of calligraphers seeking a sense of emptiness in their gestures.

Performative conquest of a summit, the paintings of Ecotopia become a strong synthesis between walking in nature, climbing cliffs and the mountain itself.

There are many places among these mountains that I call Workshops, not to consider them as places where the artist masters the production process of his works, but rather as places where the mountain works, makes work day after day. I myself am just passing through, coming back, living there for a few days.

Once again, I am a pretext, a tool that nature uses as it sees fit to produce its works.

While the technique is reminiscent of dripping ink onto canvas, it differs from, and even opposes, what the work captures.

Whereas dripping captures the artist’s energy, dynamism and presence, Ecotopia is more of a retreat, making way for the environment. If traces of gesture appear, they are only residual.

At the end of the mountains, the sea. In 2019, Ecotopia continues to listen to nature as it explores the rocky shores that form the boundary between land and sea. In a gesture similar to that of the mountain, a throw of ink from a plumb point on a canvas placed on the shore, flows and takes its imprint.

The sea in turn comes to the rhythm of the waves, participating in the design of the shoreline, covering it, diluting it, sometimes violating it. The canvas becomes a collaboration between land and sea.

In each canvas, all that remains of the artist is his walking body, penetrated by the nature that surrounds him. The canvas is in a way its withdrawal, its disappearance. These choices seem important, this mountain or that, this shore or that, but they’re not. The artist withdraws from the forefront of the work, participating, like the viewer, only insofar as he recognizes himself in nature.

Coincidentally, the first of these canvases inexorably reveal the outline of a wave.