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Machines

Lucie and Simon

The series Machines shows the strained rapport that exists between Man the Consumer - here intentionally absent - and the means of production that satisfy him. Inside factories that resemble purified cubes posed in fields, made of ephemeral materials, the foods are hygienically and vigorously manipulated until they lose their identity and their original taste. Piled up, broken down, stretched, jagged, ground up, they become boxes, series, dough, or even waste, thrown up by a chaos of pipes and robotic mechanisms, overseen here and there by Man the worker. Man drowned, lost, simple quasi-invisible link at the heart of an ocean of machines. Is this manipulation of the foods or manipulation of Man the Consumer ? Forced by his needs, he can't avoid these manipulations, witness the check-out line at the giant supermarket. With a clear, cold look, the photographs realize with animated rigidity and controlled violence the industrial universe. In one composition, we see bold metallic verticals and horizontals contrasting with the rounded shapes of foods before their transformation. Apparent abstraction, which creates the photo-graphic work, behind which disappears extreme realism. The viewer, confused, split, must draw on his imagination, his feelings or his memories from a real world, to give meaning, his own meaning, to the photograph. By alternating wide and narrow frames, he is brought into the very rhythm of the factory and the machines. The perspective, from the point of view of the spectator, doesn't admit of a state of fact, but rather of a cadence, of continuous and imperturbable accumulation.



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