THE SPIRITUAL IN NATURE

If the landscape is doomed to be transformed, or even to disappear, then should its mode of representation, like any human endeavor, not be dependent on the same laws of nature? This question on the form goes hand in hand with a moral question that the context of the current pandemic accentuates for me: what is the meaning of producing lasting works to describe a nature itself endangered by a society of abundance and accumulation?

Already in the 1960s, Land Art artists opposed the concept of works dedicated to eternity in favor of temporality and disappearance. By electing nature as material and surfaces of inscription, to use Gilles Tieberghen's formula, they integrate the process of modification, decomposition and degradation in the work and thus resist the commodification of art. Their works refer to deliquescence, the shapeless, the chaotic. Exposed to erosion, they are doomed to disappear.

​My interventions on the territory clearly claim a connection with this attitude which is as much poetic as it is political. They favor the relationship with the site, improvisation, simplicity of means and the ephemeral. The light, the rain, the waves, the snow, the wind, the grass, the rocks become co-authors of a work of which I am no more than the conductor. The artistic gesture consists in weaving links between the elements and favors a certain attenuation, a stripping down to represent what binds us to nature.

As researcher Eliane Elmaleh says about the Landart:
“By going beyond the timeless or eternal side linked to the existence of the work, this practice reconnects with the awareness of duration, of the flow of time, and of course of death: the work is mortal, but the awareness of this finitude restores life to it. The work is alive, moving, it is accomplished over time. "
("Earth as substance or Land art" published in the French review of American studies.)