Category: current-en

Series of photographs, 2026

The word phasis means in ancient Greek an appearance (in the sense of a star rising) or a revelation. Until the Middle Ages, it was used to refer to the phases of the moon. Photographs of landscapes are taken at night. Insufficient light causes the camera to produce an image blurred by its limitations, while revealing forms that the eye cannot see. In this uncertainty, the image approaches the pictorial quality of early photographs, questioning the possibility of a vision that exceeds the human eye.

Images © Thierry Fournier / ADAGP

4K video, 10’25, 40-inch screen, music and direction by Thierry Fournier, 2025.

Lacunes, video, 4K, 2025 (excerpt)

Representations of plants are most often two-dimensional: herbariums, botanical drawings, photographs, etc. The Lacunes project proposes to approach the representation of flowers as organisms, considering their space and physicality.

The flowers are scanned in 3D using a photogrammetry device: around 200 photographs are taken of each flower, from which a program reconstructs a 3D model, from which the Lacunes images are then extracted without retouching. These images are also flat, but they can be viewed from any angle in the 3D model.

However, the inability of this device to reproduce all the details of the flowers, particularly the areas hidden from the lens, generates gaps, which the program compensates for by creating interpolations of shape and color. A pictorial gesture then appears, in the signature of the algorithm and its own limitations in representing reality. This is where the “gaps” that give the project its title appear: the limits of the machine’s vision, which are also those of human vision. These flowers become three-dimensional organisms, in a vision that is both highly detailed and uncertain, raising the question of their corporeality.

The film Lacunes re-enacts the non-human nature of this vision, creating an automated journey through a program within a 3D model of a mass of flowers (a spider plant, Tradescantia zebrina). The organic plant body becomes a landscape: space no longer has scale, movement is not human. The music, meanwhile, unfolds an inner universe, made up of breaths, creaks, and resistance, which extends the organic nature of what is filmed.

Feature film, 1h41, 1:2.39, 2023, French + English subtitles.
Directed by Thierry Fournier
After Richard II by William Shakepeare, translation François-Victor Hugo (1872). Adaptation and stage direction Thierry Fournier and Jean-François Robardet.

Cast: Emmanuelle Lafon (Richard’s voice), Pierre Carniaux, Eloïse Chabbal, Aurélie Claude, Charles Gonin, Mathieu Guigue, Sophie Jaskierowicz, Marianne Kaldi, Emilie Legret, Alexia Mérel, Claire Moindrot, Judith Morisseau, Tram Ahn Ngô, Sandrine Nicolas.

William Shakespeare’s “Richard II” depicts the narcissistic delirium of a solitary power. The first feature film by visual artist Thierry Fournier, “Only Richard” stages it by confronting Richard, in subjective camera and whose voice is played by Emmanuelle Lafon, and his people who address him, embodied by actors and students, in a park and a forest.

Shot in a few days with a single camera, a great economy of means and performers reading as if in an assembly, this film proposes a poetic and political confrontation of which the screen would be both the mirror and the interface. A confrontation unfolds between actors and amateurs, a machine and living beings, non-humans and humans, the divine and the profane. It raises multiple questions about power, technology and politics, gender, the manipulation of speech and image, presence and absence in the world.

Production: Thierry Fournier & Pandore Production, with support from Ensad Nancy, Région Lorraine, Chartreuse-CNES, Dicréam, Le Fresnoy studio National des Arts Contemporains.

Installation: 4K film with sound, 24-inch recycled LCD screen, LED plates, transparent prints, paper, tracing paper, adhesive, cables, laptop, bluetooth speaker, tables, 500 x 70 x 80 cm, 2022

The installation L’insu is based on the film The Unknown. As an extension of the film, it explores the ideologies conveyed by the market economy on science and research, particularly through image banks.

A generative programme endlessly loops stock videos evoking science: laboratories, researchers, etc. Their smooth, interchangeable, technicist and falsely inclusive aesthetic could just as easily apply to companies or start-ups. These images, stripped of reality and any conflict, convey an ideology of progress, efficiency and performance. The film superimposes sentences that question these videos. What is the impact of these images? How do they contribute to a collective imagination of science and society’s expectations?

The installation is spread out on a very long table, borrowing from the codes of a workspace or research area blown apart by disorder and comprising a laptop, a dismantled screen panel and 75 prints on transparencies of images and phrases from the film. It forms a constantly renewed flow, exploding onto the table and around it in the exhibition space.

Created in residence at Turbulence, an art space at Aix-Marseille University (Saint-Charles site), at the invitation of artist and researcher Damien Beyrouthy, as part of the research project Épistémologies pour médium (Epistemologies for Medium).

The video The Unknown was created in 2022 for the exhibition Supplementary Elements at the University of Strasbourg, curated by Emeline Dufrennoy. Borrowing from the codes of advertising, the installation of the work in Strasbourg, on a giant LED screen in a shop window, opposite the tramway and at the foot of the Doctoral School, reinforces the public dimension of this questioning.