Natures mortes-veines vanités

Still lifes and tableaux vivants, Paul Pouvreau's photographs cultivate the singular and the incongruous.

Familiar with a compositional approach that makes them part of the art of plastic photography, they are always on the edge of something, between the visible and the insensitive, between the invisible and the sensitive. Her art, which brings into play cultural stereotypes as well as the visual, social and economic codes of our environment, aims to make our world the stage for a disconcerting and derisory everyday life. The artist is unsurpassed in creating images in which fiction vies with reality, and we no longer really know which is which.

With its forms of uncertainty rather than certainty, my work seems to me to be a continual play on the representation of reality,” Paul Pouvreau readily explains.

While photography enables him to put reality in order, Paul Pouvreau's approach is essentially aimed at deconstructing the subject in order to reconstruct meaning. In so doing, it is part of an image production process whose aim is to lay bare the relationships, explicit or otherwise, between the elements of which they are composed. It's a question of scale and order, in a tone that's neither lacking in rigor nor humor.

Extract from Philippe Piguet's text, August 12, 2007, for the Frac Alsace catalog.