Baryte print
Size 100cm x 100cm
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Dibond bonding 2mm
Size: 100cm x 100cm
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Magnetic American box frame in solid oak
Size: 104.5cm x 104.5cm

For more than 10 years, Gaël Hiétin has been recording portraits of territories as a fragmented map of these places during his travels and visits to different cities around the world. Melbourne, Sydney, LosAngeles, New York …

By carrying out twenty-four pitches on top of his camera, for twenty-four views, captured for three seconds, he recovers what the rotation of the lens recorded. Twenty-four witnesses burst out of a random space.

Far from the “decisive moment”; align the eye, the camera and the subject in the same line of sight, and far from the control of the point of view, which identifies the photographic eye, G.H. sets up an objective concept of space capture. Thus he attempts to remove the signature, the identity of the gaze, the psychological burden, the affect, that any artist inscribed in his work.

The camera’s risk of being endangered by the double movement of the elevation and the fall, demands the photographer’s acrobatic virtuosity. It participates in the project by physically registering the artist in his work procedure.
Three seconds between heaven and earth to offer the sight of the angel, the one that filmmakers and photographers choose when they frame their subjects in diving sight, but here before it falls…

Sometimes the artist appears, caught in a waiting position, when chance has decided to allow him to sign his work. A wild self-portrait, a fragment of the self in a fragment of the world.

“Icarus”: project identification ? But can be even more “Sisyphus” by the eternal recommencement of the gesture, as an attempt to deny this “me”photographer…. But finally, behind this announced cover-up, this attempt to erase it all over again, does he not claim, even more, a “me” to which he cannot escape…

The photographs are composed in chronological order of the shots, onboard, reconstituting a scattered mosaic of the place in a separate plastic unit.
Thus the reading becomes global, combining each image in an overall optical vibration. The eye navigates from the part through a blasted view of the landscape.
Each photograph makes sense by referring to the one that follows. As in the “exquisite corpse” of the surrealists, the sequence of images reinvents the landscape in a new vision, by accidental encounters of fragments of sky, earth, architecture, trees, rocks, faces…

The square format in which the thematic series are composed favors, by its geometric configuration, multiple combinatorial scenography. Thus, each recomposition amplifies and refreshes the perception of these mosaics of images that invite us to travel in a new planetary ensemble.

An adventure that is not over and that, perhaps, is just beginning….

Claude Courtecuisse