“Alternative Landscapes” by Benoit Paillé
This series germinated in my head during the Christmas season 2011. I pictured myself hanging out decorations in weird places. My first experiment was a string of 100 Christmas lights of one metre square. I started shooting this light installation in the nearby forest, and I realized that I would use this method to investigate the notion of landscape.
I later changed the installation into a light plastic square, 1x1m per 5cm, holding 300 LED lights linked to a dimmer. I hang it using fishing lines tied to trees. The exposure times for these images vary from 30 seconds to 4 minutes.
I was interested in the introduction of a man-made object in an outdoor setting, a luminous square, a human element that forms a relationship with nature and helps it to be reborn. From this I feel a kind of poetry blossoms, linked to the presence of this regular shape, like a recurrent canvas that symbolically references creation, the blank page, the empty space that needs to be inhabited.
At the heart of this project was also the desire to be highly respectful of the original physical landscape, disturbing it as little as possible with the installation. As there is no post production in these images, I was careful not to leave any footprints around the square, so as to maximise the relationship between the artefact and the night space.
I think that photography doesn’t represent reality, but creates it. In this project, a concrete form is integrated to the landscape and paradoxically gives to the image a surreal aspect. The whole thing is done in an empirical way, and is guided by a formal research both obsessive and demanding. These alternative landscapes offer a new reading of the potential nature of landscape, of its conventional forms and its given beauty, simplicity or magnificence.
My approach towards landscape is to incorporate a poetical component that will trigger an emotional response linked to the form and the light. I wanted to create something that wasn’t really a landscape but rather something engineered, so as to move the viewer in a different way. I experimented with this method in many locations and this global perspective, the presence of a complete series of images, adds weight to this artificial form that lights up, subdues and transforms the original landscape.
Exhibiting this series, I wish to change this luminous object into a design object. The images will be printed in large format and framed in a light box, which will link them to the original light square. In the middle of the room, I will build a space out of black drapes, within which I will put the square object itself. By recreating the installation, I hope to allow the viewer to be in a relationship with it themselves and to feel moved by its intrinsic form.
