A series of historical images of buildings and monuments, retouched by the artist who superimposes the flames that ravaged these monuments long after the time of the original image, overlaying the present and the past.
After having hunted wherever he could (including online) for old representations (whatever their nature) of buildings, cathedrals, monuments, he retouched them and enhanced them with the flames and the plume of smoke that took hold of them, one day, one night, but well after the time of the original image. Thus, this painting, in which a steamboat sails along the Seine towards Notre-Dame de Paris under a yellowish morning sky, is enhanced by the fires of the fire that ravaged the cathedral one late afternoon in 2019. Here we have the combination, in the same space, the same frame, of two temporalities and two plastic aims that everything separates. One (the first) intended to capture the monument in all its splendour, while the rectified version shows it in the unpredictable, intense, incandescent moment of its destruction. The whole series thus moves in the arcane of time, between the past of a monument and its worst future, which, however unpredictable it was, did not fail to happen.
The book is published under four different covers, randomly distributed.
Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil (born 1968 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) has been questioning how images are created since the mid 1990's, envisioned in their public and political arena. Visibility/invisibility, light/darkness, remembering/forgetting, what we know/what we think we know, evoking without showing, saying without speaking… are all markers for understanding his works, which shape the codes that structure the flow of images. Although the artist's initial preoccupations essentially focused on new cartographies, for a number of years, his work has taken a more metaphorical and performative turn.
