Lionel Bayol-Thémines

From its inception, photography has attested to the paradoxical relationship between man, nature and technology. In the wake of the great landscape photographers of the 19th century, I use contemporary imagery techniques to reveal and question our relationship to the landscape and question the impact of human activities on natural space.

My experimental practice of photography questions the construction of the landscape, the point of view, its representation and the generation of new forms of cartography which result from it. My research is part of the interrogation of programs that list and store images (Big Data), and those that generate new images via Artificial Intelligence, its algorithms and new image capture systems. Today we are in an instant connection with this globalization of data.

Whether they are participatory or managed by algorithms, these image flows lead us to question the plausibility regime of these images and their ability to document reality.

My research is an experiment on the very nature of the photographic medium, it is an investigation of the mechanisms of diffusion of images on the internet and networks. I explore software such as (Google Earth, Aladdin, Nasa Eyes, etc.) and reveal images that escape the regime of traditional photography, even if the fundamentals (point of view, framing, decisive moment) are always called upon by the operator choice. In my installations I confront scientific images, provoked images, manufactured images, and associate them to question the regime of these new images, their status and their functions. I claim a material dimension of images, by developing devices that are real photographic sculptures, that take the landscape out of the experience of the unique point of view.

(Source : Artist’s Website, Lionel Bayol-Thémines)

Through a photographic installation combining five different series (Nuques, Coussins, Colosses, Fleurs, Jambes) Lionel Bayol-Thémines offers a reflection on anonymity, identity and the group. History – the history of men, individuals and societies – appears in the background, without ever being explicitly mentioned.
The Nudes series renews the art of the bust portrait in a disturbing play of mirrors. Are these photographs of identity or ‘anonymity’? Photographed from behind, each individual remains different without being identifiable. The images of the Cushions, which we assume have been unmade (as we say of a bed that it has been unmade) by the sleep or agony of the men who lay there, and on which are laid, or from the inside of which emerge, scattered hairs, cut or still in locks or plaits, inevitably evoke absence but also memory and the persistence of the trace.

The Legs series is also about identity and anonymity, the affirmation or emergence of the individual in a crowd. A forest of identical bare legs, with an isolated pair in the foreground, perhaps aware of their difference. The Colossi series shows women lying on their backs, inert and, at the same time – no doubt because we can guess that they are pregnant – full of life. The Flowers, on the other hand, bring to mind an anonymous accounting system or one of those military cemeteries where hundreds of white crosses are lined up in a row. But because the Flowers are alive and the Colossi are fertile women, these two series are above all about rebirth, resurgence and renewal. Of the continuity of life, of the species, of memory, beyond death and oblivion.

Although seemingly disparate, Lionel Bayol-Thémines’s pure, white, almost diaphanous images form a homogeneous whole, suggesting rather than illustrating the fundamental themes of human identity and destiny, our eternal condition and the upheavals to which our troubled history has subjected us.

(Source : A. Diaz-Ronda)