LIVES AND WORKS IN PARIS, FRANCE.
Through stretches of wild land or urban micro-details, Alexander Ray Tabet explores the macroscopic remains of spaces weathered by Nature or manipulated by Man. His eye projects us beyond the instantaneity of image reigning over most of our lives nowadays and tries to seize the viewer in a state of soft confusion, immerged as he is in a landscape on the frontier of fiction.
There is something of the “overview effect” in the contemplation of these great spans of terrestrial textures, abstract and powerful like the astronaut’s view as he glances down on the Earth from space with the reliefs and marks of this familiar world blurred, and the existential shock that ensues, which infuse sensations of infinitely great and infinitely small and his own humble position as a human being.
Seduced by the swaying of colors and the grain of the textures and intrigued by the litheness of fortuitous shapes he gladly considers his photographs as paintings. One can find in them the questions of an abstract painter looking for an aesthetic relationship between shapes and colors, spatial dynamism and the intensity of apparent gestures.
This abstraction is done here by the brute force of Nature. The artist is a passive witness as are we.
In parallel, one can sense the very human research of some kind of graphic order, even wavering , of a rigorous geometry, where neither the hand of Man nor the constancy of Nature would have been able to create it. Nevertheless…
Discovering suddenly that the eye of the beholder, by simply fixating its gaze, can conceive spaces within spaces and create entire universes, these photographs, like so many windows, open onto another dimension.