Invisible Journey

Invisible Journey – In June 2021, invited by artist Thomas Mailaender to the Tuba Residency in the heart of the Calanques National Park, Julien Berthier draws his inspiration from the landscape: boats, rocks and the sea. He salvages a boat and augments it with a calanque rock carved from the same resin as the hull. By adopting the features of reality, the work in the water becomes almost invisible. Continuing his intervention and reflection on the landscape, The Invisible Journey integrates the rock boat into a series of postcards, in the same way that the real boat floated on the waters of Marseille: both visible and invisible. Deliberately low-tech, Julien Berthier’s work moves away from the digital image retouching made commonplace by Photoshop. Shapes of the boat are cut out by hand and glued directly onto the cards, creating a small volume then enhanced with felt-tip pens and watercolors. Invisible blends surprisingly well into its setting, despite its obvious deception and recurring anachronism. He embarks on a journey through different places and times, accompanying the travel tales of strangers. Almost always secondary in the image, the invisible is a pretext for looking at the world around him.