Photographed in panoramic shots, with the timeless splendor of black and white, Nicolas Floc'h's underwater landscapes plunge us, at the edge of the visible and the invisible, into the silence of infinite spaces. Immersive and magnetic, these landscapes evoke the strange sensation of wandering and floating between two waters: the surface, still illuminated by the sun, and the dark, cavernous depths of the ocean…
A feeling of wandering and loss of spatio-temporal bearings that one might be tempted to compare to the enigma of man "floating" between the two infinities in the vertiginous demonstration of the "disproportion of man and nature" in Thoughts by Pascal…
Like an inverted world, the world below, the coastal underwater landscapes photographed Nicolas Floc'h's freediving expeditions in the Calanques of Marseille lead us to the surface of the water, then into its depths, to the edge of darkness, into the antechamber of the abyss. A truly vertiginous perspective, one that transforms the ocean's surface into a celestial immensity or a shifting drapery, and the cavernous chasms or rocky walls into curiously deserted organic habitats, reflecting in subtle chiaroscuro the shimmering of the seabed, the rocks, the algae, and the water columns (those floating spaces extending from the surface to the bottom)...
A work as magnificent as it is useful for cataloging and preserving these undeniably fragile territories. The landscapes of the photographic project "Invisible," presented by the Maubert gallery after having been shown this summer at the Carmignac Foundation in Porquerolles and at the FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, are in fact the result of a public commission from the Ministry of Culture, intended for the inventory of these landscapes of the French coasts invisible to the naked eye.
Far from any fantasy or anthropocentrism, having chosen to "eliminate the exoticism of color," but not the plastic beauty and pictorial dimension of these landscapes sublimated by the piezographic printing process, which produces a fuzzy, charcoal-like effect, Nicolas Floc'h, by revealing the almost lunar beauty, but also the great fragility of these unexplored underwater immensities, seems to be working as a visionary, like a certain Victor Hugo who, in sea workersHe wrote: "To see the inside of the sea is to see the imagination of the unknown. It is to see it from its terrible side."
“Invisible” – Maubert Gallery
20, rue Saint-Gilles, 75003 Paris
Until January 8
By Stéphanie Dulout
