Artist Paul Rousteau’s practice pushes photography to its limits, distorting reality and breaking free of conventional representation standards. Blending the medium with digital art and painting, his work is an experimental hybrid, examining the relationship between painting and photography.
It is with this pictorialistic approach that Rosteau visited Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny, France. Struck by the simultaneous paradise of the gardens and the “trivial vision of groups roaming it as a tourist attraction,” Rousteau considers how amateur photography in the digital age has shifted our relationship to the medium. “I looked in the thousands of daily images produced at and on Giverny,” he explains. “Bugs, glitches, software errors and other digital alterations are then printed, painted upon, and re-photographed, therefore questioning the status of the photographic image, of its author, and of its consumption in the digital era.”
“These images are a testimony to an amused reflection on the successive steps of an artistic movement. From its belittled avant-garde beginnings to its accession to mainstream culture. Shifting to a commercial and ornamental status, one emptied of its revolutionary principles. Between sacred and profane, my vision navigates between an homage to the Impressionist master and an iconoclastic reappropriating of an oeuvre, contributing in the creation of a new medium we, mistakenly, continue calling Photography.”
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