WIDE OPEN


« These moments of intense communication that we have with our surroundings – a row of trees, a sun-filled room – are themselves elusive. We enjoy them only insofar as we communicate, as we are lost, inattentive, wide open. If we stop being lost, if our attention focus again, then we stop communicating. If we try to understand, to capture the pleasure, then it dodges our grasp. »

Georges Bataille, Inner experience.


This series results from the moments of intense communication we can have with our environment, insofar as we know how to open to it and to the present time, without trying to grasp what in essence exceeds the understandable.
Captured by a hectic and frenzied life, we are focused, we know where we are, what we are doing here, what we have to do, we are heading to some place, we have goals. This state of mind involves a closed behavior toward our direct environment. We don’t live in the present, but always thrown towards a future. We don’t know how to belong to the present and to ourselves. We are still haunted by the past while what is forthcoming pre-occupies us and grabs our full attention. Those two non-existent dimensions of time – what is no more and what is not yet – eat away our life from its two ends for finally getting to its core.
To escape this blind and alienating mechanism inherent in the human mind, it is necessary to try to free oneself from those two chasms, even though it appears difficult, maybe impossible, at least temporary. Set aside what has happened, what is going to happen and what has to be done allows to recover a present being, to belong again to oneself and the surroundings.
Freed from the two crushing voids of past and future, we belong to the instant, we are open to him, wide open, we become communication.
These photographs are the highlights of this communication, the traces of a dialogue with the pure present.

(click on the numbers on the right to see the different parts of the series)