Presenting Matthieu Gafsou

Adventures in sociological photography!

Since 2015, Tectona has partnered with the prestigious annual photography festival Rencontres d'Arles. In fact, Tectona has always been passionate about this art form, regularly commissioning photographers for its new collections and for portraits of designers. Matthieu Gafsou, who also has a keen interest in architecture and design (notably he teaches at ÉCAL in Lausanne) and has received numerous awards including from the prestigious HSBC Foundation, has honed a photographic language that is as unique as it is complex but remains at all times profoundly humanist this much is evident from his collaborations with Tectona where he can make designers and objects alike reveal their essence!

The image is both a drawing and a photograph and neither. It defies classification. We can see children playing with water jets, ghost-like white buildings and an otherworldly orange sky. It exudes joy and at the same time slightly disturbs us. Its origin is a photograph that Matthieu Gafsou took for his latest project entitled Vivants in Xiamen, China, in 2018, and then dipped in a petroleum bath. The result was a photograph that is timeless, not from the past and not from the future. An image that is both fictional and of this world, at least the part of the world we don’t see but that Matthieu strives to reveal using different techniques, some quite unconventional. For Vivants, an epic series on how climate destabilisation is degrading our world, Matthieu spent four years (2018-2022) travelling the world, reading Alain Damasio and Philippe d’Escola, photographing (in black and white) people waging battles in favour of the environment, factories causing pollution, mother nature in her splendour and sublime animals (in colour) as well as (posed) portraits of his children playing in the contemporary Eden.

His photography is kaleidoscopic! His series cover an extraordinarily wide range of subjects ―an abandoned object, a majestic plant, a sun being― and techniques ―colour and black and white; documentary photography and more conceptual photographie plasticienne. A veritable explosion of styles that gives rise to fragments not of the imagination but of dreams! As exemplified by aforementioned Vivants, H+ (2015-18) on transhumanism, Ether (2015) on how human activity leaves traces in the sky, Matthieu Gafsou creates what he calls “maddeningly incomplete narratives” of the present. Narratives conceived as veritable films that provide new ways of looking at the real world and thoughts that inspire us. It doesn’t come as a surprise to learn that this photographer who presents himself as a quasi-sociologist first studied philosophy and cinema. And even if he refuses (wrongly in our opinion) to see himself as an artist, his photographs, whether taken individually or especially as series, reveal an underlying arc if we consider them as works in motion. Through him, all objects come alive, like his series of Tectona chairs in the desert or the ‘lived in’ benches of an oddly empty Musée Picasso. Gafsou, a photographic adventurer of real and imagined lands!