What is a PhotoGraphics ? English
A PhotoGraphics is a picture with a soul of painting.
Alain Bellone takes so much freedom with his camera as a painter with his brush.
4 circles serial Quadryptique Alain Bellone 2007 (4 pictures 30x30 under plexiglass on a black 70x70 plexiglass plate 1/6)
It really starts like a photography, as an act of « writing with light ». It is still photography since it is an snapshot, resulting from an intention and a point of view, mixing an iconoclastic method and luck, the magical ingredient which any art needs. Alain Bellone diverts the rules of photography to reach the visual arts. PhotoGraphics is mainly a question of complete freedom out of conventions. But he also applies demands. And limits. It never consists in « headlight effects » and even less in Photoshop manipulations ! PhotoGraphics does not result from infography but from the snapshot.
Everything takes place at the time of shooting.
Photographics are not fake photos or a virtual images. Each snapshot is unique and can’t be reproduced. Like any photographer, before printing, he sets he brightness, the contrast, and the colours, in order to stress the nature of the photography and mainly its pictural characteristics. Retouching is exceptional (and if he does so, he says it). The intention is to stress what he was looking for, what was given to him and above all what he saw. And he does not impose anything from what I saw. As Nadar said, only « the feeling of the light ». Using his brush camera and the light as a palette, he draw an image which tries to help to see something, rather than to show something.
PhotoGraphics are above all a poetry of image, another way to « depict » the real world. Using the vibrations of light to transform the reality, Alain Bellone creates forms which are almost palpable or, on the contrary, totally abstract. His PhotoGraphics are windows where everyone can define what they can see, read references or let themselves suggest without trying to find a meaning. It is just a « reverie ». As if the night took us to a frontier between two worlds. Two worlds where appear fantastic animals, celestial beings, almost palpable materials. This is also where he finds radiant colours, energy and movement, until he reaches pure abstraction.
It is on this frontier between photography and paintings, between the real world and dream, that Alain Bellone invites you to let your eyes reinvent his PhotoGraphics, as children looking at the clouds….
