Exposition Space Utopia - Vincent Fournier

About

When he set foot on the Moon on July 21th, 1969, the astronaut Neil Armstrong said words that now belong to the heritage of humanity and remain fifty years later, still mythical and captivating for a generation of men and women.

«That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind. » Neil Armstrong, 1969.

The artist Vincent Fournier, graduated in sociology and from the National School of Photography in Arles, works on dreams and challenges offered by this cosmic conquest. For the last ten years, he has been traveling the world looking for places, situations or meetings related to space exploration.

From Baïkonour to Grenoble, via the United States, Asia, India, Russia or Norway, the artist travels the world in order to confront new spaces and territories, as an endless quest for the pursuit of these imaginary worlds.

Photographer of the wonderful, but not of the sensational, Vincent Fournier proceeds to the methodical exploration of these almost virtual places, as they seem elusive and distant. The vernacular architectures of the astronaut's machine rooms or training halls depict a mechanical and robotic world, where cables and interconnected networks face natural or marvellous, desolate or vertiginous landscapes.

Between tangible and physical situations and fantasized worlds and adventures, the artist, whose photographs are always more suggestive than documentary, installs a sublime and magnetic reality in the landscape that has become a backdrop. This exploration proves once again that this access door to somewhere else, so idealized, remains a source of eternal wonder to mankind.

Fanny Robin, Curator of the exhibition