“Essence” is about the world beneath the surface.

An attempt to perceive the shapes, the formulations of the subconscious… A kind of wakeful dream whose contours, at first unclear, detach themselves from the darkness, from fundamental obscurity, to wrap themselves in meaning.

A photo coverage, in sum, of the infinity of elaborate, surprising projections of the desires, anxieties and affects that jostle one another in the deepest folds of the mind.

“Essence” came into being in the course of a “free fall” exercise, giving birth to an almost secret form of expression. A kind of automatic writing made up of shapes and visions, sometimes linking to tell a story, as fleeting as it is powerful.

Black is of the utmost importance here. It is the womb of fertility. Any attempt at clarity necessarily stems from it. Darkness precedes and follows life. It is the matrix that feeds our cells, our dreams, our fate. The result is an interface. A formatted, finite point of exchange between two zones of darkness. Exchange is the function of this interface. And that exchange is also called life, the intersection of in and out. Traces of these exchanges are inscribed in matter, in reproduction, in excrements, in the imagination…But what makes sense of it all, what distinguishes us from our animal corporality, is the trace of thought, that energy that continues to resonate even after death.

These are the sparks that I search for in faces, places and situations. The essence of being, a state that is almost imperceptible in the chaos of this world, but that justifies life best of all…

“Essence” aspires to be a realistic portrait of what structures us, but is out of our reach…