A photographer passionate about the “flipsides” of photographic images, or more exactly, by their implicit and “hidden” apparatus, which invites a given representation over another, the artist has eluded documentary photography. Instead of photographing artworks, she shows us their invisible frameworks (bases, backing canvases, etc.) – which disappear just as soon as the “expected” photograph will be made. Inlay backgrounds from film studios become blue or green monochrome landscapes, perceptual spaces akin to the immateriality of the immersive light works of James Turrell. Materiality and immateriality, colourful lights and spectrums, but also presence and ab- sence, reality and fiction are recurrent photographic dualities found in After the Image and that will reach their artistic maturity in the Phénomènes series; images of that which appears, but also of that which can hypnotise the gaze and sharpen the imagination, both through the incomprehension of sight and the conceivable of the unknown. Thus these latest images derived from research undertaken at scientific la- boratories that reconstitute the operations of natural phenomenon become these spaces of projection, as poetic as the names of the “scientific objects” for which they represent the theaters of our imaginations... supernova, black matter, or vortex...
Michelle Debat