Guilhem Touya
Landscapes of raw beauty, bathed in a permanent twilight.
Elements in fusion, as if heated white-hot by massive
fires.
Plants and animals reduced to glowing ghosts.
Each image in this series reads like a postcard from an
alternative future. Night becomes a backdrop on which a
dystopian and poetic world, returned to a wild state,
unfolds.
Under the harsh light of flashes, natural landscapes
transform, suspended between collapse and rebirth.
By evoking ambivalent feelings of beauty and strangeness
in the viewer, this series reflects the evolving
relationship between humans and Nature: it appears to us
increasingly threatened, yet also threatening.
This anticipatory documentary narrative comes from long
nocturnal wanderings in remote natural sites: deserts,
mountains, forests... These images are constructed at the
moment of capture, using artificial lighting and color
gels, without photomontage, post-production coloring, or
generative AI.
What was your motivation or inspiration to build ‘Chromatic Dystopia’?
My inspiration comes a lot from the sci fi or the books when I was a teenager, I grew up in the cyberpunk era. I was a huge fan about this kind of literature and also aesthetic, films and video games. Matrix, Blade Runner. And so I wanted to portray a mix between the current world and the universe that I grew up in, always close to nature.
I come from the southwest of France in a very rural, countryside part of the country. A very small village close to the mountain. So for me when I took these photographs during the night in the mountains, it was a way for me to reconnect with nature and also to express this feeling a term we use in France called echo anxiety, which means the fear of uncertainty you have when thinking about the future of the environment and nature.
It's a fear that human activity will destroy everything in the end. When you talk about the future you always think about technology and stuff like that. And for me it's not only about humans, but also about nature, animals, plants, stuff like that. So for me there is a time when I think about technology and nature and there is a gap between us. It continues to extend because of our fear of natural disaster because we live in cities, because we are really used to living in big cities with everything offered to us.
There is a wall between nature and us that gets bigger and bigger everyday. And for me, technology contributes to that division. In the case of art, it is exactly the contrary.
Art is a way to reconnect with nature because when I go outside in the forest, I forget about technology and get to go face to face with the mountains or the forest, where I can create freely and investigate new patterns that inspire me.
Archives represent an innovative and inspiring way to present work. For emergent artists, it is an opportunity to enter the market and offer a new version of exhibiting and commercializing art. Being able to create or be part of an archive as an artist, gives you more space to generate and create your work.
What are you really passionate about as an emergent artist? How are you able to transmit that passion?
Creativity. When you create, you stop being a spectator and start to be the protagonist of your art work. Being an artist is a way to be an active actor of the world, and I'm really passionate about the fact that photography is a way to show to people your vision, because when you go outside and you see something you will always have a different perspective than the person next to you. Also photography was a passion that was difficult for me to realize that it was what I wanted to do with my life. I started taking pictures when I was 18 years old, and at first I thought that I couldn’t be an artist, because my environment was not artistic at all, but later on I discovered that my passion was, mostly in photography, and that art was the way in which I want to discover the world.
I used to find inspiration in books, music and films but I really think that I found my essence with Chromatic Dystopia. I think that with this project I found a really strong root connected with my childhood, for the first time I could develop my stuff thanks to flashes and artificial lights and it was like experiencing magic for the first time, to disrupt the reality in front of me and create this futuristic, sci-fi universe. That was the moment I made a new discovery of my photography, where it all started. It was as if I had started all over again and began to be much more inspired, with more hunger to create.
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