About | Bertrand Gruyer Art

The hidden face of chance

My images are simple photographs, never retouched nor reframed. Their subjects are random shapes created by chance. I found them throughout the cities, where entropy interacts with the Anthropocene.

I'm far from being the first to notice the expressivity of random shapes but I'm probably one of those who reap them in the most systematic way. I dive in their complexity in order to frame images that exist only for themselves. In my photographs, there's nothing but the subject, but the subject is not the subject anymore.

What I like about the shapes born with no intention, is the freedom they give to my own intention. It's what they reveal of our gaze, its projections, its interpretations, the fact our eye somehow creates what it looks at.

I was raised by my mother whose passion was art. It's my love for painting that gave me the need to take photographs, the abstract paintings that has impressed my retina ever since I was a child. The subjects I find awaken pictural universes so different from each other that my series turn out to be extremely diverses. Each time my eye adapts like the water taking the shape of the container.

What if the hidden face of chance didn't look like chance, but like a world of creativity among which everything seems to be born from an intention?