Paul ROUSTEAU - La Défense, les fragments de l'invisible, 2020

Paul ROUSTEAU

Born in 1985. Lives and works in Paris, France

Photographer Paul Rousteau radically rejects technically perfect photography. Like playful experiments, often floues and overexposed, his enigmatic works catch the eye with their washes of luminous colours, as seen through a kaleidoscope or flottant in the soft mist of a waking dream. When taking pictures, he pushes his cameras into their entrenchments and, like an alchemist, opens the doors of his perception.

Paul Rousteau spent his entire schooling at an alternative school in Steiner-Waldorf. Thanks to this experience, he has developed a sensitivity to the perception of the forms of life, but also a défiance towards conventions. At the famous school of photography in Vevey, Switzerland, he explores the flaws and errors of photography, while revisiting the joyful iconography of his childhood. In filigrane, these scenes reveal the artist's deepest quest: "to show the invisible".

Between abstraction and figuration, painting and digital art, Paul Rousteau's unique images never cease to draw magazines and clients into his colourful universe. Harmoniously mixing fine art and fashion, portraiture and travel, his images have appeared in The New York Times, M Le Monde, Dazed & Confused, The New Yorker. He has worked for brands such as Hermès, BMW and Louis Vuitton. In 2017, he was selected to be part of the finalistes exhibiting at the Hyères Festival and was nominated in 2019 for the HSBC prize. He has exhibited in China, Germany and Italy. In Switzerland, he is represented by the Galerie Forma Art Contemporain and in France by the Galerie du Jour Agnès b.

The work for Paris La Défense

La Défense, les fragments de l'invisible:
In La Defense, man is on first-name terms with the sky. Above the ground, in search of greatness, he overhangs nature, lands on the clouds, takes aim at his aerial facades. A lark mirror, this mirage is a decoy. At the gates of perception, blinded by the Sun King, man, in the void, loses his footing. His ignorance bumps into the glass walls. Faced with the speed of light, his body gives way, his materials merge and become fluid. Faced with the limits of the visible, his truths collapse. For nature still reigns. Changing, it imposes its mystery on us. Immaterial, air and light sculpt and reveal our reality. And it gives us to perceive, in fragments, its fragments of the invisible.

Some references

Art Cinétique
René Magritte
Jacques Tati, « Playtime »
Les Epoux Delaunay
Le trompe-l’oeil

LA DÉFENSE, LES FRAGMENTS DE L’INVISIBLE, 2020
Photography
Edition of 1/5 + 2 EA
Credits Paul Rousteau. Courtesy Paul Rousteau