FUTURE BEFORE
Brazil
In his series on the utopian yet very real city of Brasilia, the photographer confronts architecture and human beings. These pictures invite us to a space-time journey.
Fascinated by the manifestations of the future, the artist explores its multiple facets, from space adventure to the metamorphosis of the living, through architectural utopias. The utopia of Brasilia is as striking as a novel of anticipation.
Built ex-nihilo in the Brazilian desert, designed in 1957 by the urban planner Lucio Costa and built by the architect Oscar Niemeyer, this dream capital embodied the future of the 1960s before freezing for eternity. It is now a time machine, which has served as an illusionist set for the photographer.
Windows in portholes, passages similar to the corridors of orbital stations, structures placed on stilts making them look like flying saucers, one pushing the metaphor to the point of surrounding itself with a ring evoking Saturn… the space fantasy is omnipresent.
The sky serves as a backdrop to these horizontal architectures playing with fullness and emptiness. With his aerial angles and his shots banishing perspective, managing to make us confuse ground and facade, Vincent Fournier defies the laws of physics in this city governed by the dogma of geometry, and whose disembodied volumes border on abstraction. The slightest human presence creates a surreal effect, which he skillfully plays with to stage the spaces, using the modernist lines as a theater of visual experiments.
In its diversity and movement, life is opposed to the rigor of architecture, whose rational uniformity generates an impression of solitude. A certain haunting poetry emerges from the aesthetics of these vast structures. By losing their human scale, they have gained posterity. Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987, Brasilia has found a new dimension in being immortalized by Vincent Fournier, some of whose photographs have been included in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and that of LVMH in Paris.
@vincent_fournier_artist
Exhibition “Uchrony – Vincent Fournier”
Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature
62, rue des Archives 75003 Paris
Until September 17th
Sophie Reyssat