Jean Yves Cousseau deliberately transforms his photographs to erase any notion of temporality and avoid falling into a nostalgic posture. He chooses to skin and oxidise them, inflicting metamorphoses that reinforce or alter their meanings, giving way to new memories inscribed by rust, stains and erasures. In this way, time is palpably felt in her work.

For the artist, photography is not simply a way of capturing reality, but becomes a material to be worked with. He uses broken glass and rusty metal, and exposes his photographs to natural elements such as water and weather, covering them with plant deposits. This approach, worthy of a contemporary ecologist artist, creates alterations and imprints of these natural elements on the images.

Jean Yves Cousseau’s photographs, with their evocative and poetic titles, become imprinted on our sensitive memory, without us being able to situate them in a precise space-time. The exhibition at the Orbis pictus gallery is accompanied by a book co-edited by Art3 Plessis Éditions and the gallery, including specially written poems by Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat and an afterword by Gaëlle Périot-Bled, which subtly explores aspects of oxidation and the marks of time.