{"id":59,"date":"2021-12-11T21:29:04","date_gmt":"2021-12-11T20:29:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/evantiaschaudat.com\/?page_id=59"},"modified":"2026-05-29T15:52:59","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T13:52:59","slug":"textes","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/evantiaschaudat.com\/en\/a-propos\/textes\/","title":{"rendered":"Texts"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The Metaphysical Photography of Evantias Chaudat\"
Victoria Le Boloc’h-Salama<\/a>, Independent Art Critic<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Evantias Chaudat's work is part of a visual history and a history of art that forge a tenuous connection with science and nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At times familiar, at others bordering on the codes of science fiction, Evantias Chaudat's sensory photographic and video landscapes evoke disconcerting cosmic horizons. Here, the aim is not to open the doors to a parallel world but to activate an introspective state regarding our perception of the universe in which we are included.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With garish colors, voluptuous black-and-white forms, and close-ups tending toward abstraction, from one series to the next, Evantias Chaudat blurs the lines regarding the subjects depicted. She addresses the dizzying question of the mystery of being by photographing elements of the landscape, plants or minerals in a quasi-scientific manner, often experimental and without subsequent modification after the shot. Using photographic rings that allow for close-up exposure of the subject, like a surface microscope, or through multiple exposures of negatives, Evantias Chaudat transforms these captured natural elements into portions of an imaginary territory freed from an anthropocentric Western vision. Her poems, photographs, and films urgently point to the need to reconnect with the metaphysical foundations that govern our world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Evantias Chaudat's work thus reactivates a common language where bodies amalgamate with ancient materials, like the echo of the Earth's buried memories, where the infinitely large and the tiny imperceptible, the inert and the moving, the ephemeral and the eternal, are fragments of a whole, constituting an ancestral and absolute unity, a Monad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

December 2024<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The Light From Which The Night Is Made\"
Matthieu Gounelle<\/a>, astrophysicist and writer<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We all know it: you can't hold back the clouds, which, as soon as danger threatens, hide in the blue sky. Evantias Chaudat has managed to capture this elusiveness in her video Caresser les nu\u00e9es<\/a><\/em>. In this work, the artist casts a patient and thoughtful gaze upon clouds forming and shifting in an icy sky. Echoes of a distant storm tell us that these metamorphoses, however gentle they may seem, can also take the form of torment. Chimneys appearing briefly in the frame remind us that humankind and its creations are not indifferent to the sky, and that these turbulent clouds are also, in a way, our own. Thus the clouds pass, lending the fleeting and unfolding time its hue of eternity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This state of gentle fascination, this taming of time, is found in Trouvailles<\/a><\/em>, a video that follows meteorite hunters on their quest. Their gaze fixed on the ground, these men and women search the Atacama Desert for fragments of sky, a touch of blue on the ground. In just a few shots, the artist reveals the unique relationship that develops between these mysterious figures and the stones fallen from the sky, with the desert as their sole witness. While the dark and luminous colors of the meteorites invite us to delve into the paradoxes of an ever-changing material, the voiceovers of the hikers immerse the viewer in a cataleptic and poetic state, one that allows us to see what is invisible to others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In these two videos, we grasp the importance of maintaining the right distance from people and things, a distance that Evantias Chaudat observes. This common element emerges in the wide diversity of the works presented: respect for the scale at which things move. This attentiveness, which one might superficially think distances us from the subjects and objects photographed or filmed, is in reality the best way to approach them, to see them in their nakedness and truth. In the series Nuit<\/em>, where circles of light shine in the darkness, we see lighthouses whose colors swirl like a kaleidoscope. We also glimpse all that shines in the night: the eyes of a feline, the desires of night owls, or even the fire of distant planets. But we also discern a diffraction pattern, revealing the atoms of the night. Yet it is not easy to make visible the light that makes up the night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That of which beings and things are made. Just as clouds were children of one cloud, it could well be that human beings are sons and daughters of statues. In the series Chairs min\u00e9rales<\/em>, the photographer's eye rests on statues with the sure gentleness of a demiurge. The births evoked by these black and white photographs, with their pronounced grain and stark luminosity, are countless: the birth of man, the birth of the statue, and the birth of man again, reborn from the mineral. With her gaze fixed on the very flesh, Evantias Chaudat imbues the statues with a disturbing sensuality, heightened by her attention to the marks left by the chisel, to the traces abandoned by time. Here, too, it is as if, through a process of diffraction, we are granted access to the very flesh of things, to their unsettling and secret wound. Evantias Chaudat's gaze reveals the multiple paths that unfold from man to mineral and from mineral to man, blurring the lines we thought firmly established between humanity and its works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This blurring of essences is also at work in the series \u00catres<\/em>, which combines portraits of animals, plants, and human beings. These black and white photographic prints are intended to be inseparable, forming an indivisible and potentially infinite whole: that of the world in which we live. Far from the divisive and classificatory modernity, the different kingdoms of nature merge here, evoking a strange feeling of fraternity among all these beings who, seen from the right distance, resemble one another and yearn to draw closer. Seized by an irrepressible desire for intimacy, we too wish to stay with the iguana or the horse, to love this elderly woman with her serene wrinkles, or even to share the life of this flower whose name we don't know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the same way, we don't know the names of these men and women, caught in front of mysterious buildings whose right angles and geometric perspectives contrast sharply with the often organic nature of Evantias Chaudat's work. The columns, staircases, and vast spaces presented in Forces<\/em> inevitably evoke Giorgio De Chirico and his metaphysical anxieties, or a bygone world: that of the vast Soviet glacis. Amidst this monumental architecture, passersby pace the unseen, feigning ignorance of the film scratches that, like melancholic stars, streak across the sky. These specks are the result of a meticulous film conditioning process involving immersing the film in boiling water, lemon, and soap for 48 hours before rinsing it with cold water and leaving it to dry for several weeks. The aged film, prepared in the same way as the canvases of the great Renaissance masters, imbues the image with a prehistory that makes it less immediately legible, but eminently more poetic. The photographs no longer float in an abstract and undefined space but are anchored in the past, and the marks, scratches, and stains become the trace of the secret thoughts of the women and men who took them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This work on the materiality of film is also present in the series Mues<\/a><\/em> and Origine<\/a><\/em>. For the first series, the artist used film that had expired 50 years prior, found in a friend's family home. For the second series, she created double exposures, meaning that for each photograph she took an initial shot, then rewound and superimposed a second shot. In both cases, we are confronted with a reality that has become unsettling and wavering, blurred and duplicated. Our gaze is drawn beyond the surface of things, into a space we are not accustomed to frequenting: the space between surface and depth, the space of clarity that, I am convinced, holds the mystery we seek.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

November 2021<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n