> Hervé le Goff

By recreating reality with his own harvest of images, Michel Kirch invents a universe

that he explores until he gets lost. The three levels of an exhibition invite to discover what

scholarly and poetic work in which everyone will find happiness and vertigo.

With their flamboyant chiaroscuro and the depth of their half-tones, these photographs

subjugate the visitor, assailed by the formal beauty and the mystery it serves...

It would be daring to improvise oneself as a guide through a universe that questions

even the author of his image. Mastering the light like an artificer, managing the space like an architect, Michel Kirch succeeds to melt in the same crucible the worry and the wonder, the logic and the unconscious.

Compared to the minimalist or even monotonous trends of contemporary photography,

Michel Kirch’s work opens to the eye with the naive power of representations of the Apocalypse, and even into the limbo of dreams, or in this luminous corridor of which those who come back from imminent death, to the border of tangible and nothingness.

Photographing without haste or premeditation, he stores landscapes, elements

of architecture possibly candidates for his images, captures characters, animals...

The work is realized at the end of another wandering, in this very personal and 

increasingly rich fund, explored on the screen of the computer as a “Terra Incognita ».

Little by little, an idea is emerging, a skit takes shape and things get set up until the image expresses the imaginary.

The work of Michel Kirch is reaching an increasingly wide audience, interviewed or

seduces in its various degrees of reading.

 

 

Hervé le Goff

Journalist, art critic