Eric Bourret

Johannesburg Art Fair 2016

 

Born in Paris in 1964, Eric Bourret lives and works in the south of France and the Himalayas. The work of this "artist walker" has been influenced by English land artists and landscape photographers. Since the start of the 1990s, he has been traveling the world on foot, over every kind of terrain and at every altitude, making images he sees as "experiences of walking, experiences of the visible". He talks about the potential that walking represents for sensory and physical transformation: "It heightens one's attention and receptiveness to landscape."

 

Bourret's expeditions can last for anything from a week to several months. But he always applies the same protocol. He superimposes a number of views of each scene so that the geological and human time scales merge. With the multiple reiterations of the initial image, a part of it disintegrates on the surface of the film before taking concrete form. The final result represents a summation of different memories into a "temporal layering" that is vibrant, oscillatory, almost animated. The practice of "walking photography" can also take the measure of a landscape, and of walking itself, in sequences of images that are more factual, with the insertion of dates and places, distances and durations. These images can be seen as aesthetic attestations, or as unusual, sensorial complexes of rhythmic qualities. At the same time, they comprise a distinctive repository of subjective experience. As Bourret himself says: "I'm made up of the landscapes I traverse, and which also traverse me. I see photographic images as receptacles of form, energy and sense."

 

Since 1990, Bourret's work has been exhibited in and acquired by many museums and art centers in Europe, United States and Africa. He has participated in the Paris Photo Art Fair, as well as the 2015 Venice Biennale at the Palazzo Mora.

 

In 2016 Bourret will exhibit during the Dallas, Seattle and Joburg Art Fairs as well as at the Saatchi Gallery, London.