Maciek Stepinski

Maciek Stepinski's oeuvre wavers between the desire to straightforwardly capture the triviality of reality and the desire to remove from that reality its fictional substance. His thoroughly refined photographs describe a deserted world inside which landscapes act as décor, and where the handful of men in uniform are offered to the eye like so many characters/inhabitants. In the series N-113, Maciek Stepinski seems to be interested in the construction of a national highway, and the intrusion of the mechanical in the natural landscape. But we slowly realize that this crossing is just a pretext, and that the documentary truth of the images is only of any value with regard to the revelation which they bring about. The revelation that an imaginary world already exists in each one of the photos. N-113 is an assemblage, a look taken at several construction sites (roads in Lorraine and Austria, and the real N-113 highway...), which together sketch an undifferentiated world within which everything is there and everything escapes.