Common Places, 2005
Let yourself be tempted by a panoramic vision, embrace at a glance the expanse of a landscape. Stop and look. Certainly, Fabrice Picard leads us there, but in his own way, skillful and ambiguous. The places photographed, without being familiar, are not unknown to us. And yet, suddenly, we no longer grasp them, because his point of view constantly chooses the obstacle, the crossing of lines, shapes, the relationship of the masses that will thwart our expectations, blocking the horizon and perspective.
Surrounded by a network of blackish poles – poles stretched between the sky and the shore -, confronted with an uncertain latticework grasped by dark vertical ones, oscillating between two openings made in the shadows by the light, we are projected, out of sight, into the foreground, without possibility of escape or retreat. It is then that the journey begins, that from one end of the rectangle to the other, our captive eye wanders around and discovers, through rigorous panoramas, the strangeness of ordinary places… that another landscape is born.
Quentin Salomé