Text Ecus

JEAN FRANÇOIS RAUZIER A world beyond limits

Jean-Francois Rauzier’s large format photographs transfigure reality. They impose their obsessing frontality and invite the spectator on an unprecedented journey into the visible. Distorting the Euclidian dimension, juxtaposing the whole and the details, they propose a plastic approach that breaks away from the unique point of view of the Renaissance. But above all, these evocative panoramic images place contemporary man at the core of a dizzying network of knowledge that renders him master of a new time-space where the macrocosm and the microcosm, the virtual and the concrete, the rational and the imaginary cohabitate. In 2002, when he first created what he calls his hyperphotos, Jean-François Rauzier, already a well-known photographer was searching for an artistic approach that differed from the traditional pattern. His quest: “to see at the same time a larger vision and close-up, to stop time and be able to examine all the details of a fixed image”. In other words, in using cinematic language, to which his work often refers, to achieve at the same time a 180° panoramic image and an ultra close-up zoom. Why? To point out, among other things, what escapes the eye, knowledge, and reason. And to find the hidden evidence of an intrigue that presents itself to the viewer in its blinding truth as in Antonioni’s film “Blow-up” or in Edgar Poe’s novel “The Stolen Letter”. “Fabricated” by the artist on his computer using hundreds of close-ups taken with a telephoto lens, these montages are filled with incongruous or surprising objects. In a sort of cinema scope, they project their deceptive realism: “For that, I’m careful to respect the shadows, reflections, and the true faults of reality”, says their author. Some of these reconstitutions can go up to 2 million pixels and 30 GO! An expertise that permits, for example in “Poppies”, to restitute the amplitude of a field of wheat as well as the insects teaming among its blades of grass, or as in “Paris” to sweep a whole section of the city at night, and yet penetrate the private lives in apartments where the lights are on. “No lens is able to achieve, in one single shot, the sharpness that I obtain by assembling 200 photos”, explains the artist who works on his screen as a painter on his canvas. On his digital tablet, he crops, redesigns, assembles tree trunks, branches, leaves and other objects and elements collected patiently, at the site, when something inspires a future fantastic, bizarre, or baroque scenario. Inventing tales, unfolding supernatural visions, drawing the spectator into the wanderings of his reveries - this is, in fact his objective. His challenge? Transform the world according to his fantasies, desires, interrogations, and rediscover the magic and strangeness of tales and legends using XXIst century tools. An original and inspired approach for passing from singular to universal and for conjugating the present with the timeless. Elisabeth COUTURIER Author of “l’Art Contemporain, Mode d’Emploi” (Filipacchi)