Master’s Thesis in Art presented at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles, France

February 2020

This thesis revolves around two central themes : the idea of memory, and the pursuit —through drawing— of an original landscape, a landscape before life.

In the summer of 2019, I spent two months kayaking down the Danube River from Ulm to Passau, Germany. I was searching for a kind of wild, almost idealized Nature. Yet for two months, I encountered only a river shaped, controlled, and transformed by human hands. This realization gave rise to a series of charcoal experiments, attempts to approach something I had not felt during the journey itself. While the ink drawings made during the voyage depict reality with precision, the charcoal works strive for something else : memory, dream. These charcoal landscapes become a field of experimentation, an attempt to move beyond mere representation. Humanity has no place in this nascent Nature, where only rivers, rocks, and forests stretch across the Earth’s crust. And yet, are these drawings still too marked by the human to evoke the idea of a truly primordial landscape ?

These landscapes undergo a process of destruction before being recreated in a cloud of rock, dust, and light. They become evanescent, fading into indistinct forms against a pure white background. In the Middle Ages, this state was called Natura Naturans : nature in the act of becoming. There is a kind of materialism here, where the Earth is like a vast living creature, coursed through with movement and furious whirlwinds. The Earth remains nebulous, in perpetual metamorphosis, a matter in the midst of transformation.

• Part I :
  Technique : Charcoal
  Size : 50 × 65 cm
  Paper : Canson 220g/m²

• Part II :
  Technique : Charcoal
  Size : 30 × 40 cm
  Paper : Canson 220g/m²

• Part III :
  Technique : Ink
  Size : 13 × 21 cm
  Paper : Moleskine book

• Part IV :
  Photographs from the exhibition