Familiar

We recognize – or think we recognize – everything : situations, landscapes, people, who could be neighbours, friends, even family members. Nothing spectacular, but a gentle strangeness, attention paid to tiny details, moments suspended in time, variations in light when it becomes magical and surrounds everything with a familiar halo of unreality. Both realistic and mysterious, inexplicable and yet close, this universe is constructed pictorially – before devoting himself to photography, this artist was a painter – around colours that with the greatest prudence avoid describing, all the better to make themselves felt. The eye, never feeling attacked, plunges into an atmosphere devoid of roughness, there in a complete serenity to move about from detail to detail, to a pose, a moment of abandon,, an acceptance, the fullness of a landscape, the fluidity of the sky when it meets the sea, the supple elegance of an interior that has become a still life. Close to us, close to our homes, should we decide to look at them, here is a succession of moments of light that exalt the beauty of the world and decline emotions. Christian Caujolle