Soleil - In 2016, as he walks the streets of Los Angeles, his mind filled
views of the city captured by Weegee and Garry Winogrand in the 1970s
1950 and 1970, Sébastien Reuzé decides to exclude from his objective any form
identifiable urban area to focus only on the sun. In a city
Steeped in sun worship and the counterculture of the Beat Generation, this
face-to-face is essential to capturing a vision of the American city that
is not so much documentary as sensitive, iconographic and cultural. It
The result is a series of images whose framing is invariably frontal and centered, the
sometimes saturated yellow-orange tones and almost abstract renderings are registered,
to varying degrees, in these different histories of art, science and
of culture that meet and intersect. These photographs show us
invite a confrontation which, in the age-old tradition of Claude and
Turner, and in line with the first photograph of 1845, asks the question
of the sun as the very condition of the image and of the gaze, and considers their
transcendence. \n \nSoleil by Sébastien Reuzé explores the omnipresence and the
invasive beauty of this motif, taking into account its popular dimensions
current but also exotic and outdated, and highlights their paradoxes. These
paradoxes are found, among other things, in objective frontality and the
artificial tones, in seductive colors and brightness
disturbing, in the popular dimension but with cultural value. If we are
far from the natural and atmospheric lighting effects sought by Claude and
Turner, or grayish but accurate renderings of the 1845 photograph, this
The sun of 2016 brings us back to it with the dazzle it causes and the character
both realistic, sublimated and imaginary of the reality that it conveys.
(Veronique Souben)
