Presented as part of the Off program of the third edition of the Drawing Festival, Arles

April 12, 2025 > May 11, 2025

De la Glace au Sel (From Ice to Salt) is an exhibition that invites us to experience the journey I made in the summer of 2024. This journey revolves around water, starting from the source of the Rhône in the Swiss glaciers and ending in the arid Camargue delta. For three months, I travelled the length of this great impetuous river in a kayak, confronting its whims and admiring its beauty, but also present condition, severely altered by climate change and human activity.

The works presented are an invitation to immerse oneself in a universe that is as personal as it is universal. The gigantic chiaroscuro landscapes fascinate as much as they question. Do they really exist ? What is humanity’s place in such spaces ? To immerse oneself in this work is to question our own existence, our relationship with others, with nature and with the world.

At a time when the United Nations has designated 2025 as the International Year of Glacier Preservation, to highlight the importance and fragility of glaciers, De la glace au sel creates work that navigates between the documentary and the poetic, between reality and abstraction, a thread stretched between past and future with a relevance to the present.

“9:00 pm, July 14, Rhone Glacier, Switzerland
I am at the source of what will become the subject of study and inspiration for my future thoughts and drawings : the Rhône River. To the west, it winds its way down the valley from the great waterfall. Clouds cover the mountains and a strange, evanescent mist over the distant lake seems eternal. Blue, dark green, a few touches of fiery red. Is this water at my feet the same as at its delta in the Mediterranean, where the river empties after a journey of some eight hundred kilometers inland ? I lay out my bag, a chair, two notebooks, a few pencils, charcoals and pastels, and begin to draw and write the first pages of a long, solitary journey.

3:00 pm, September 14, Camargue delta, France
The sea, at last. I return to the studio.”

• Part I :
  Technique : Charcoal
  Size : 50 × 100 cm
  Paper : Carta Pura 270g/m²

• Part II :
  Technique : Charcoal
  Size : 20 × 40 cm
  Paper : Lana paper 220g/m²

• Part III :
  Technique : Collage (writing, charcoal, pastel, ink, argentique)
  Size : 20 × 40 cm
  Paper : Lana paper 220g/m²

• Part IV :
  Photographs from the exhibition

Link to additionnal content :

• Video presentation

• Press kit

• Galerie Huit Arles