Faced with immensity as much as with detail, Mélanie Desriaux’s work is the projection of an interior search that ignores material, geographical, or temporal boundaries, and her photographs always obey to a “desire of the wild as a conquest of reality “, nourished by encounters and observations, by measures of time and space.
Atlas
Atlas holding up the sky. In the native territory of photography, the Observatory of a cartography.
From Paris to the Atacama desert in South America, by observing the Universe, Man explores the human condition. The observation of the stars is tainted with uncertainty, plotting out the terrestrial lines, tracing landlines; this is the beginning of the journey. Turn the document over, plunge into fiction; explore the ground.
Meet astronomers, rummage through the archives, climb up the Pic du midi, look at the eclipse – the gradual color change of the Moon, its polaroid shape, its phosphorescent halo – appreciate Nature.
Observe Man as he is; changes. And still more, a vital need to go beyond reality. Go towards the unknown, cross frontiers, step beyond the visible to see more; links with reality. Stories emerge. Tied to everything, but open to the rest, I write elliptically.
A mental approach to extract from this mass how we think and see. I plunge into my mind to highlight in the world around me an image of what I see within myself.
