Commentary Marie Pa Scale Us

HYPERPHOTO BY JEAN FRANÇOIS RAUZIER Jean-Francois Rauzier lives a double life. By day he is a renowned commercial photographer reputed for his work in advertising, and widely praised for his stilllifes, as well as his sculpture, painting and poetry. By night, he haunts less civilized preserves, scavenging urban and abandoned industrial zones for traces of their past. He has the meticulous craftsman’s unsparing eye for details while his vision is informed by the alchemists’ insight into the hidden power of raw materials. His photographs transform stone, metal, wood and paper into visual poems where the ordinary is elevated into the timeless. Transcendence is achieved by his unwavering focus on physical details: Gold is created out of a rusty nail, a sandy desert emerges from a scarred wall, shark skin is conjured from a stretch of mottled, cracked pavement. Jean-François Rauzier has been scouring the streets of Paris since 1986, baring its unhealed scars, and then venturing further to its abandoned industrial sprawls. During his nocturnal wanderings, he stalks his prey: Tiny, ghostly forms hacked into a crumbling wall, intimations of fossils embedded in asphalt are sought-after treasures. By night’s suggestive light, the photographer would metamorphose a slab of concrete into an ocean and spin a drenched sidewalk into a swirl of stars. His show, “The Flesh of a City” was exhibited to great acclaim in Paris, Neuilly and Clermont-Ferrand. Since 1992, Jean-Francois Rauzier has been even more deeply immersed in the “soul” of substance. He transfigures the object by the light of a lamppost, a flashlight or a filter, abolishing all relief and perspective. Every image becomes a microcosmos. In time, this personal introspection has matured and softened. He veers towards more ephemeral horizons – finding serenity between earth and sky, and accompanying his photos with his personal poetry. Today, Jean-Francois Rauzier works on a different scale, spilling into a new imaginative dimension. Broadening his quest, he is intoxicated by fields and infinite horizons. A native of Normandy, he has retained a love for grey, tormented skies, and skimming, preternatural light. He now conjures a more expansive world whose sweeping poetry still conceals a plethora of minute details, detectable to only the most attentive viewer. His technique is to capture hundreds of details in his lens and then juxtapose and sculpt them into a monumental and panoramic photographic image. His bare bucolic landscapes are inert and oblivious to time. Only the perspective given by a road or a pathway marks the frontier between the untouched and the human. This surrealist universe is mysteriously void and sometimes eerie. Here, armchairs drift on the waters only to be submerged, hundreds of frames hang in a forest, celluloid swimmers lie scattered on a path, balloons drift from a rusty fence in the middle of an open field. Departure, flight, disappearance, escape, abandonment, absence, tracks, traces and memories are the recurring themes. Yet, despite the intimations of emptiness, life is fully present: Look closely and you will find it in the form of a spider weaving in the underbrush, in the scratching of an inquisitive little rat, in the padding of a far off cat or the imaginary flutter of a caged bird. Here, the infinitely small encounters the cosmic, details partake of eternity, revisioned by the ceaseless roaming of an artist-as-seeker’s soul. Marie Pascale RAUZIER