THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CHANCE, MERELY SYNCHRONY

The Battle of the Amazons | Metamorphoses 0xB09FE203 © Éric Petr, 2o2o

“My work constitutes a thought process on the nature of light – a quest for its essence.

I borrow light, in its most primitive form, as raw material, as the foundation, the architecture of my entire photography. Light is not used as something that can show or illuminate what is around us, but only for what it really is, for its undulating, corpuscular nature.

I fashion this light in such a way that its filtering, reflection or dazzling may redefine the space I happen to be in and offer a different perception of the world.

I ask the question of whether our actual perception is but a placement of our own selves in relation to the universe, and as a result, if this perception shapes our own comprehension of reality, or should I say, of a certain reality.

My work is part of a meditative endeavor, but one where I am personally detached from any introspection. I like the idea of being crossed by atoms, of feeling so vast that we have a sense of being in every place at once, yet also focused on just one point, the one my camera happens to be located in. I engage in long working sessions to record the vibration of a place, its atomic resonance, or its indecipherable atmosphere, and like a film whose duration plays out in just one image, a story unfolds according to the diction of scenography and movement whose inspiration is in sync with the elements composing this very place.

In my work on the “Metamorphoses”, light intervenes in a specific way on the reflection of objects, so that their scene setting in situ creates figures akin to dilated bodies, figures composed of floating ethers coalescing in complex and destructured shapes that the image, when developed, restores, as if they conformed to a potential reality.

These bodies do not belong to space or time, nor do they belong to our world, they are but aggregates of waves and particles locked in a perpetual motion, elements which come and collide with my inverted T wave, just for one, brief moment.

My photographic writing is direct, that’s to say that it enters into a narrow relationship with the material. It is born from a meeting that takes but an instant, fixed on the border of temporality, caught between a being and the universe. This is what we could call a point of contact between Heaven and Earth.

There is no such thing as chance, merely synchrony. My meeting with the DF Art Project is of this nature. I would never have thought that there could exist as many common points.

And if this beautiful meeting with Déstructuralisme Figuratif took place, it is also because all the elements had come together so that my work could contribute a humble stone to their edifice. And above all, the DF Art Project involves a communion of individuals around a societal thought on human beings and the infinite possibilities of transgressing their shape through a fragmentation of the figure. A whole aspect of my work enters into consonance with this position, one where figures dilate, and where this full expansion of my imagery aptly questions the conceptualization of these shapes and their quantic connection to reality.”

by Éric Petr

About Figurative Destructuralism

The structure DF Art Project, represented by the Figurative Destructuralism movement, is an artistic collective of living plastic artists sharing a vision of art which is common to them and by which artistic work is oriented towards a fragmentation of what is real. This reality is put into perspective, distorted or dynamically transformed.

Through this conceptualization, the artists position themselves against a rising tide of individualism, where human exchange has given way to rampant loneliness. Their introspective focuses on analysis and the multidimensional creation, where the surreal comes to the fore and where, more generally, new less human, more virtual interactions are created.

These perceptions aim to reveal, through what could be called an optimistic rally cry, a situation, probably generational, of a globalized society in the throes of mutation facing – a society faced with an uncertain, ever-changing future.

Through artistic creation, the DF Art Project presents its considerations on a society where true possibilities for the emancipation of mankind as well as like the independence of human imagination are being redefined.

https://df-artproject.com/en/

DIFFRACTIONS

zzb 0x3877BF03 | Éric Petr
光 0x3877BF03 © Éric Petr, 2017

In my images, the visual material is redefined, the objects are broken down to be reassembled according to volumes and complex plans, giving a new conception of our vision of the world. 

Pablo Picasso changed through his expressive gaze, the perception of objects and the space that surrounds us to surprise and question the viewer.

In my own way, I recompose our perception of the world by retranscribing the information felt in a language made of visual material.

The vibrations or impressions that I feel in certain sublime places are captured by the prism (or pentaprism) of my camera to take shape in the field of our visual perception, just like light waves (this matter forms elementary particles ) which pass through the pinhole of a black box to take shape for our eyes by their simple diffraction.

In a way, it is a question of suggesting to the reader to feel what is, more than to see what was.

A priori, the reading does not seem direct but as one discovers my images, one gradually finds the keys necessary for their readability and understanding.

In a time when we need to understand everything immediately, where time gives rhythm and orders our emotions, the timelessness of my photographs urges the observer to stop, to suspend his time, to disregard his daily life to penetrate the multiple strata of my images and free his subconscious.

SCRIPTPHOTOGRAPHY | A SILENT WORD

Blog Éric Petr
Dichotomies 2o15 © Éric Petr

There’s a silent and distant world from ours

There’s a silent and distant world from ours, a world whose happy and luminous or nocturnal and solitary voice suggests to those who know how to listen that two and not others are the raw materials of photography: Light and Time. Light and Time are the territory that interests the French photographer Eric Petr. The works of his series are more than photographs, they are devotional tributes, luminous gifts to the impalpable consistency of matter. Eric Petr engages with Light and Time a respectful hand to hand, a game of approaches in which to win are all. The light, which writes its essence and which leaves marks of itself on every surface here, in Petr’s works is left free to spread.

It’s incorrupt. Indomitable. It’s fluid and mobile and Time guarantees its flow or, if you prefer, it is left free to write its own story. And what we read, or rather, we observe, is a warp in which each of the elements allows us to admire the irrepressible dynamism of luminescences that have become matter.

Staticity is defeated. So, then that the flow is free, to attend an anthology of forms. The Light, unhinged from the physical plant, is produced in ectoplasmic appearances with irrefutable beauty such as splinters on a dark universe. Other times it is a suggestive, allusive reference, almost to signal a latent presence that will soon threaten to flood the scene. But then, sometimes happens, the benevolent nature of the Light, held by the hand by Time, is produced in figures that remind us of something: although we are not reminded, we don’t wait to recover its memory: there is a magic even in secret; and in front of such a show more than committed to an answer we are called to his admiration. Waterfalls of light, games of light. A “liquid” light, mobile and active.

Eric Petr calls us to assist the invisible, invites us to see the elusive stopped forever in his shots, while we remain aware of having witnessed a prodigy. Moreover, we are witnesses to the unleashing of primordial energy in which the elements possess an ancestral indomitable force; and to this tumult we ask to be transfixed.

Eric Petr knows how to act and takes us on an “electric” journey where, with the mastery of an orchestra conductor, he directs the flickering luminescence of a material that has become a soloist: the Light writes its history and without omitting anything. So here it is while transmuting from the darkest cracks, swallowing the amorphous space of the dark, breaking free in the spectrometric power of the “chroma” and gathering together every single component that composes its nature to give life to a cascade of life.

Because the Light in Petr’s photographs is life that spreads, which affects its passage with a gash in the darkness. The work of Eric Petr, his research is the attempt to return, to give the Light the chance to break free from the debate that sees it with shadows because it definitely takes on the role of protagonist, part that once obtained convinces us about the choice.

Text by, Giuseppe Cicozzetti

Text in English translated from Italian

https://www.facebook.com/scriptphotography/posts/387183108404241

THE EYE OF PHOTOGRAPHY | INTERVIEW

THE EYE OF PHOTOGRAPHY

A Favorite of L’Éléphant

Eric Petr is a French photographer born in 1961.

He lives in Marseille and, very discreetly, walks around with his camera into public and sacred places. His photographs dazzle, amaze young children through their beauty. They subjugate, astonish mature viewers.

Eric Petr, at seven years old, was a precocious and talented “shooter”. Humble and belonging to no one, his photos, variations of light, summarize what life is: fragility and greatness. …

INTERVIEW

Why did you choose photography?

I didn’t choose it. It imposed itself on me as if something in my subconscious memory was always connected to it. When I look into the eye of my camera, a distance from the world is created, and this distance is what gives me the necessary space to feel in sync with this world. Ever since I looked though the viewfinder of the 6×9 my father lent me at a very young age, I was fascinated by this alternating ambiguity between being an observer and an actor in the observation. For me, photography is the way to free something unconscious, dominated by an instinctive drive, inspiration.

How did you end up making these types of photos?

It was a long journey, but, in the end, when I think about it, everything is pretty consistant. I always had the desire to draw out the invisible record of the interconnection of universal elements and the relationship that connects us to them.

What would you like to photograph you haven’t yet?

My dream would be to photograph what came before the Big Bang, just to reassure myself and tell that our universe is only a fraction of a spark of a world in perpetual movement, not a world frozen between parentheses, a world without a father.

What influences the figurative for you?

The figurative stabilizes the elements. It assures us that we are. It reassures us in the sense that we can see, is. It creates an image frozen in our present. This image take an atemporal dimension through which our minds can travel in the spacetime of our imagination.