Animal Geographies (1985-1987)

With reference to :

• - Baroque Art
• - Italian Theater principles
• - The uses of Enchantements,The meaning and the Importance of fairy-tales, by Bruno BETTELHEIM (1976)

In the Animal Geographies, as though out of politeness, photography leaves the front stage of the “has been” to the frailty of the painted sculpture. Photography shifts the ground of our nostalgia and we, as viewers, are disturbed by times: the time needed by nature to shed its art coating, and the time the photographer and the photograph must have needed to bring those animal-like landscapes forward. When a photograph reproduces a sculpture-fiction which exists only to disappear, the temporal photographic process is bound by it and, out of delicacy, must withdraw and give up its place to this new dweller in time and its disappearance. Now these disappearing sculptures can only appear inside and through photography.

... François MÉCHAIN walks around a bush, he prowls on the look out for a chimerical tree, he runs along the by-roads just for the pleasure of being in search of surprises, the pleasure of conceiving a sculpture-painting, so that, from one leaf to another, something new may happen, something that was neither in the tree’s nature nor, of course, in that of the sculpture painted on the growing thing. This is the very point when photography alone can step in: the right framing, the right depth of field and the right shooting angle change a painting-sculpture on natural leaves, such a virtual collage does, into the zoo of a circus, into an oriental menagerie or into a museum of prehistory.... Photographs of ephemeral sculptures seen like geographies, like venues between arts and culture experiences.

Frédéric LAMBERT, 1989