bénédicte reverchon exhibition the moulting and the chameleon

The earth, the ether / 2000

This series is born of the attraction that I always had for the clouds, their strong evocative power related to their ability to surprise me by their perpetual transformation, while remaining elusive. Alfred Stieglitz impressed me a lot with his series Les Equivalents by managing to create a form with impalpable, without reference, evoking a senior executive.
After I became interested in the sequence and the material of the cloud, I went to explore a site that is part of my immediate environment. Thus, I often see the vapors of cooling towers of a nuclear power plant. I felt the need to go see them more closely. This place is my cloud factory. I place them at the meeting of nature and culture. They are the result of a human creation subject to meteorological phenomena. "Clouds and water do not form the ether" wrote Aristotle in Weather. For him, the ether was an area beyond the earth charged with energy both hot and dry. Later, for the romantics, it was instead a floating space, vaporous conducive to a vagabond thought.
This photographic series shows the source, the earth, place of anchorage, lurking at the bottom of the image. The density of its blacks is enough to impose it. The cloud becomes the element of passage. The presence of words is there to remind, as a leitmotif. A stretch of time and space, poetic energy