Académie des Beaux-Arts 23, Quai de Conti 75006 Paris France
Mois de la photo 2010 Point information 5,7 rue de Fourcy 75004 Paris France
For over 20 years Thibaut Cuisset has focused on the landscape, the environment, and the notion of territory. His photographic work has explored the whole world: Morocco, Venezuela, Australia, Italy, Andalucia, Switzerland, Japan, Namibia, Iceland, Russia, as well as Brittany, the Pays de Loire and Normandy. As Jean-Christophe Bailly says in his text about Cuisset’s work in Japan: “Each photographic project takes a different country as its subject". During these generally long-term “campaigns”, where scouting for locations gradually gives way to actual photography, there is no place left for improvisation or accident, especially as Thibaut Cuisset’s work is diametrically opposed to reportage: “a country is neither a background to an event that has to be covered, nor a network of clues that have to be grasped, but a series of landscapes where typicality is slowly revealed through permanent scenes that are like so many little hiding places”.
His work involves impregnating himself with a feeling for a region or country via careful observation, taking the time to capture the “spirit of the place” in its least obvious guise and exploring the subtlest folds and furrows of the landscape. “By articulating subject, light and colour as precisely as possible, and by a process of elimination and paring-down, I seek to represent, discreetly but powerfully, the essence of the landscape, where anecdote, exoticism, picturesqueness and pathos have no place”. Working with soft, restrained colours, the artist shows that far from being a fixed object, the land is the result of history and constant human intervention. And although from one landscape to the next and, consequently, from one series to the next we notice similarities and might even begin to construct a typology, the fact remains that each series, consistently underpinned by the same way of seeing, has its own unique tonality.
At a time when exoticism or catastrophes are all too often used as pretexts for landscape photography, Thibaut Cuisset has been calmly working much closer to his home territory. In his latest photographs made in 2010, for which he was awarded the Prix de Photographie by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, he strives to assert the uniqueness of the French countryside, looking at it in a way that is devoid of patriotism or nostalgia and choosing to observe areas that have seldom been studied. A gentle vision emerges with a simplicity that is nevertheless not so far removed from the grandeur of the landscapes he photographed in Iceland (in the series entitled “Le Dehors Absolu”) or Namibia. His pictures are astonishing for their beauty, of course, but also because of the life that runs through them and contributes to the great diversity of the French landscape.
All these landscapes are the result of a constant shaping process that the artist attempts to render and authenticate as the pure effect of passing time, dealing as accurately as he can with both their equilibrium and their upheavals.