Paul Rousteau is a young French photographer whose approach is based on experimentation. Don’t expect sharp in-focus pictures, his photographs challenge our perception. Navigating between figuration and abstraction, painting and digital art, Paul Rousteau has developed his own aesthetic: enigmatic figures bordering on hallucinations that seem like they’re straight from the pages of a waterlogged photo album. We spoke to him about serendipity, his punk approach to digital and the inspiration he finds in painting.


THE LIGHT OBSERVER : There is often movement in your compositions and the impression of looking at the photographic subject through a filter, sometimes reminiscent of an aquarium or a distorting lens. How did this idea of distortion come into your work?

PAUL ROUSTEAU : I went to study photography in Vevey, Switzerland, a great school, very professional, with a high level of technical requirements. But rather than catching up on my technical skills, I made a list of all the mistakes that a good photographer should not make and I worked hard to include them in my practice. Because I wanted to show things differently, in a complex way. Because human vision is much more complex and blurred than a well exposed photo. So the reflections came out of a desire to change the way the camera records reality. I provoke optical illusions, chromatic aberrations, I play with scales. It’s a desire to mix digital art and pictorial references.

How do you balance your work between digital and film photography?

I use film very little. When I do use it, I really like the look, but I especially like to experiment with digital. I have developed a very punk-like digital technique that aims to reduce its sharpness. I would say it’s a technique that lies somewhere between painting and photography. I also print out my images and repaint them. I want to have a complex, occasionally dirty, image in reaction to these smooth and commercial images that we see everywhere. This ambivalent technique, between painting and photography, is also a way of encouraging viewers to question the images they see.

Painting and photography share a certain manual quality. The process of revealing the image by bathing it in a liquid finds a visual echo with your photos.

I have never developed a silver-based photograph in a darkroom. However, I make my own digital prints that I repaint by hand, sometimes adding water on top.

What forms appear through this manual act? What effect(s) are you looking for?

I am looking for random shapes. I like to say that I am an idle painter. Not only because I paint without having done the difficult apprenticeship, but also because I have taken a lot of pictures of birds (idle in French is oisif, which resembles the word for bird, oiseau). I want my pictures to be light, to look as if they were made easily, in one gesture. But this requires a lot of work and very little idleness in fact!

What role do you give experimentation in your work? What does the unexpected allow?

I always prepare my shoots with a feeling in mind, a range of colours, a light, a face. However, I keep the story and script undefined, because when I shoot, my attention is mainly focused on what will appear in or next to the frame. This allows me to change my intention. Serendipity, those “happy accidents”, are often richer and more genuine than a mood board or a predefined idea.

Some of your photos seem to have a soggy feel to them. This gives great formal strength to your compositions. How do they relate to water and light?

A sunset, for example, is the combination of air, water and light. This phenomenon can create an infinite variety of shapes and colours. That’s what I’m looking for. As well as an emotional and spiritual immersion in colour. 

Can you tell us more about your relationship with colour? It plays such a predominant role in your work.

Colour is everything. I use bright, radiant colours because they visually capture the emotion I sometimes feel when I see the world and its beauty. These moments are epiphanies. By epiphanies I mean evidence of a manifestation from beyond, evidence of the miracle of creation. 

I have the impression that through photography you question notions of visibility and invisibility.

In my work, I often try to show the invisible. I have no proof that an underlying world exists, but I make images that could illustrate it. Like many people, I wonder about the origin of the world, about the secret architecture of life. 

Your photos remind me of those by Yoshinori Mizutani, for example. Are there any photographers or artists whose work you particularly appreciate or with whom you feel a certain affinity?

I question the limits of photography, I look at it every day in books, magazines, manuals, on Instagram, the Internet. I try to learn as much from the master as from the amateur. But since I want my photographic writing to be free, it’s difficult to be inspired by other photographers. I draw my influence primarily from painting. It is painting that gives me emotion, makes me vibrate. Especially painters who do not respect reality, who invent their own. As a spectator, I like to see the different interpretations of the world that an artist proposes. It is these personal and subjective visions that I admire, for example, in Art brut (Outsider art), Persian miniatures, the Apocalypse Tapestry or in artists like Pierre Bonnard, Giotto, Emil Nolde, Fra Angelico, David Hockney, Picasso, and Hieronymus Bosch. 

There is a certain idea of mystery and wonder in your vision. How do you preserve this capacity for wonder in your everyday life?

I want to share the contemplative state I sometimes experience with the viewer. This “pleasure of seeing”, these complex and intense emotions that are difficult to translate visually. That’s why I experiment a lot. Sometimes an image comes close to this feeling and reveals the grace of creation. So I keep it. 

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