Florence Tissières was an art restorer for many years. Thanks to this background she mixes theoretical and technical knowledge in her artistic work. Purity of form, detailed care in execution, re-use of material which has nothing to do intrinsically with artistic creation, are the bases of her various works.
In her series entitled «Architectures utopiques» she inverses proportions, volumes and values. She became interested in the variety and distinctive packaging of chocolates and biscuits which suggested to her structures in the negative. She demonstrated this by using the packages as molds. The result is finely detailed volumes resembling both building models and classical sculpture. Voids become reversed solids, a disposable object is ennobled by being created in bronze, the invisible takes on substance through plaster with a patina closely resembling Carrara marble, perfectly balanced shapes in miniature portray monuments which do not exist. Silhouettes and shadows conjured from the molds are then transformed by the camera lens into unreal and, because of their colors, utopic images yet as close to known reality as castles or renowned buildings. Born of the void, the sculptures thus revert to intangible chimera.
Taken at night in deserted urban areas, Pascal Greco’s photographs are bathed in a strange light which amplifies the colors. They display a rigor achieved through symmetry, contrast, lighting and structured surfaces. The absence of humans accentuates the theatrical quality lent by the acid colors of the night lighting. In certain photos the monumental structures telling of glory, impermanence, solitude are the only characters in the space and they shape it.
Elsewhere, a street corner reveals the underside of the scene: cracked earth, the sky sliced up by electric cables haphazardly attached to a pole at the center of the composition. Two worlds are often side by side: one, dilapidated sheds and the other, soaring buildings of glass and concrete. The colors, the way textures are rendered and the purified light give a painted look to the photos which accentuates the feeling of facing a wholly created scene like a photomontage. One tone is always dominant giving a specific atmosphere without ever imitating nature. The color green is rarely present or has such an artificial hue that we have difficulty relating it to plants. The town seems to have won and has become self-sufficient, with no need of humans.

The films made by Pascal Greco also evoke the frenetic relentless rhythm of a city which transforms it into a gigantic biomorphic organism at the heart of which beat the lights of the night, and where tiny humans come to shelter, as precious as desert flowers.
Guillaume Estoppey’s pastel and pencil drawings offer us fragments of a mysterious and troubling parallel universe which the artist divides and organizes into strict categories, much like the first drafts of a future encyclopaedia. In this series of drawings, the structures are literally integrated into the rock. They may be dug into it, constructed on a cliff or overwhelmed by solidified lava after an apocalyptic event.
In other drawings there are vestiges of a lost city, a stone desert once again but with outcrops that are too regular. The landscapes and the interiors are totally deserted without a trace of life. The strange absence of humans is emphasized by the over-perfect regularity of the architectural structures the larger of which almost become trompe-l’oeil. The titles given by the artist offer a new perspective on the images: sensations (heat and drought), moods (Sundays in autumn, recurring weariness and happiness), metaphors (debts and omissions). The drawings take on another deeper dimension as if we are offered a code which confuses while at the same time opening a path towards a completely personal rational which increases the mystery. Added to the complexity of these two levels of interpretation is the hyperrealism of the technique which works against a surrealist result. Because of the smoothness of the pastel medium, the image finally becomes purely pictorial.
/// Guillaume Estoppey
/// Pascal Greco
/// Floriane Tissières