Jean-Gabriel Lopez is a photographer for whom the outside world possesses an objective existence. He seeks to capture a reality. A chosen reality: that of the sky, light, clouds, and the vagaries of light rays—in short, that of the atmosphere. Through his choice of subjects, Jean-Gabriel Lopez’s images appear as scientific evidence and naturally raise questions about the boundaries between photography and scientific imaging.
Heliography is the name of the pre-photographic process developed by Nicéphore Niépce in 1825 to record the action of light on a plate. In astronomical terms, it also means the description of the sun.
The sun is the only star that can only be photographed in broad daylight from Earth. These heliographies are astronomical photographs of the sun taken using a photographic device consisting of a simple hole called a pinhole.
These dazzling images are quite close to what can be perceived with the naked eye.
2023
Espace photographique Arthur Batut, Labruguière, Tarn
10.11.2023 – 04.03.2023
2017
Galerie SIT DOWN, Paris
11.04.2017 – 19.05.2017
Bastion de l’Orangerie du domaine royal de Meudon
01.04.2017 – 30.04.2017
Jean-Gabriel Lopez was born in 1962. He lives and works in Paris. After studying science in the early 1980s, Jean-Gabriel Lopez trained in photograph restoration at the National Heritage Institute (Institut national du patrimoine). At the same time, he began developing an artistic approach, notably creating the 6480 sampler, a sort of large box that makes it possible to sample the body using a camera and an articulated arm controlled from a computer. This work earned him the grand prize from the École des Beaux-Arts and, shortly afterward, a residency at the Villa Medici.
Since then, Jean-Gabriel Lopez has pursued two parallel activities: that of a consulting expert in digitization and heritage conservation, and that of an artist. Nonetheless, he considers that his work as an expert and his artistic approach converge, because he does not view digitization as a cold and objective operation, but rather as a means of giving an identity to a collection. Technique thus serves aesthetics, much like in his artistic practice.
His work is based on the use of photography as a means of investigating reality.
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