Geoffroy Mathieu

Geoffroy Mathieu's works refuse to be pigeonholed in the formal category which it is customary to summon up when contemporary photography is involved. Like poetic and/or documentary ways of looking at things, they lump together genres which do not lay claim to one side any more than another. In overlapping subjects like so many personal interests (the body and its surroundings, the landscape undergoing transformation, the Mediterranean town or city), we find in his works a sure gaze which masterfully and aesthetically presents a relation to the perceptible world. The spareness of the forms and the distances from reality hallmark Geoffroy Mathieu's images with the seal of what one might at first take for artificiality. But the temporal dimension of the projects (which at times spans several years) and the intrusion of visual accidents nevertheless remind us that they represent precise sociological and geographical surveys of our environment. Transaled by Simon Pleasance