Topographies

It is about constructed portraits graphically with elements borrowed from maps, from plans of architecture or still from the boards of the natural sciences. The chosen elements are determined according to certain characteristics of the represented person. On one hand, the term of topography is chosen because it infers the representation of the relief and, by there even, three dimensions (or more) which our imagination needs to develop. On the other hand, because the topography is by extension the description of a person in its physical and psychological aspect. What underlies this work, it is the reflection on the constant changes that we have representations of the world and the universe in which we are. To refer to the thinker whom was Héraclite, under a visible immobility the human being doesn’t stop, as the nature and the cosmos, being in a state connecting opposite, necessary for harmony of things. He names this state logos, among which one of the most remarkable appearances is the fire, which lights, which is universal, which destroys so much that it is a creative principle. Here it is singular and imagined mappings which are printed by engraving in the laser, thus of the light which burns. The use of the leather echos the first media of writing and particularly the first maps of the world which were realized on some vellum (very fine skin of calf, goat or sheep), such for example Mappa Mundi of Hereford about the end of the XIIIth century (Hereford is also the name of an English race of cattle). This material allows to evoke all the more unstable aspect of the world and the beings by the fact as it is a skin. The fact of engraving/burning it refers to the contemporary and popular practices of the tattoo. Its association in high technologies stresses the hybrid character and the disrupting of its traditional uses.