Letizia Le Fur
photography

Les échappées (Openings) | 2019-2022

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             In The Poetics of Space, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard describes the window as the threshold between this side and beyond, a transitional element of the inside-outside. Through the photographic series Les échappées I mean to question reality and illusion as did the Flemish painters, and later the Surrealists, for whom the window was the space in which an image appeared. By playing with this motif, I wish to explore what we conjure on either side of these frames within our homes.

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             Increasingly concerned with ecological issues (when they are not sanitary), our physical movements are becoming difficult and the idea of motionless voyage (or immobile travel) is interfering in our new reality and we are slowly getting more and more accustomed to our computer windows. Les échappées reminds us that the windows of our homes are also a powerful gateway to the imaginary world and provide as much access to the outside world as they do to the inside world, to the intimacy of the domestic realm. This work aims to offer a poetic response, a possible escape from the monotony of an impeded horizon.

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             In my photographs, the importance given to the landscape, compared to the few clues as to the place from which it was taken, creates a formal ellipse, a topos of the viewer's imagination. The landscapes photographed are at times real, at times slightly transformed or even totally fabricated. By composing these imaginary scenes I reflect as much on the depiction of beauty as on a fantasized otherworld.