As our knowledge of the world advances, the world itself paradoxically seems to become ever more elusive. Landscapes change, seasons fall out of balance, familiar landmarks shift, while images proliferate to the point of sometimes obscuring what they claim to reveal. Faced with this profusion, some artists choose to slow down the act of looking. Rather than simply recording reality, they seek to reveal its depths, its transformations and its many dimensions. In their hands, photography ceases to be a mere transcription of the visible world and becomes a space for thought, imagination and experience. It is in this spirit that this new edition of Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire takes place. The works brought together question not so much what we see as the way we look at it. They invite us to venture beyond appearances and discover a world in which time, memory and narratives shape a reality far richer than that revealed at first glance.
In the Donkey Stables, Gilbert Fastenaekens opens the exhibition with photography that develops over time. For several decades, the artist has returned tirelessly to the same territories, allowing time to transform his gaze as much as the places he observes, often steeped in history, memory and suffering. The fragments of the Luberon forest presented in this exhibition do more than depict a landscape. They convey a sense of presence born of patient observation, in which every branch, every trunk and every glimmer of light reveals the quiet yet profound vitality of the living world.
In the Agnès Varda Gallery, Arnaud Lesage pursues this exploration by challenging the very foundations of our perception. Through inversion and the use of negatives, the landscapes in his Oxoscapes series lose their familiar reference points and become spaces of uncertainty. Between photography and mental construction, these images invite us to look at the world as though our habits of perception had yet to be invented.
The exhibition continues with Patrick Faigenbaum, whose photographs, displayed in the Porcupine Gallery, reveal a body of work in which light, composition, colour and time lend even the simplest objects a distinctive presence. Fruit, plants, fabrics and glass acquire an intensity comparable to that of human faces. Through them, the artist creates a meditation in which memory forges subtle connections between people, places and things.
In the Lower East Wing Gallery of the Château, Sabine Pigalle draws upon the imagery of Les Quatre Saisons. Rooted in art history while embracing the possibilities offered by contemporary technologies, she creates images in which the cycles of life meet great symbolic narratives. Vegetation gradually envelops the human figures, reminding us that humankind belongs fully to the natural world, sharing its rhythms and transformations.
Finally, in the Lower Le Fenil Gallery, Raphaëlle Peria transforms photography into a living material. Through a patient process of scratching, she reveals an image buried beneath the surface of the print. Foliage, rocks and waterways seem to reassemble into a delicate network of white lines, as though the landscape already contained within itself the traces of its own transformation. The artist's gesture thus unveils what has been waiting to be seen.
This new edition of Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire thus brings together five profoundly distinctive artistic approaches, united by their understanding of photography as a space of transformation. All invite us to suspend our certainties, slow down our gaze and recognise an element of the unknown within nature's most familiar forms. More than ever, photography emerges as an art of unveiling and revelation.
Chantal Colleu-Dumond
Curator of Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire