Alexandre Dupeyron doesn't seek to document the world as it is, but to reveal its fragility - what flickers at the edges of perception. He moves between the visible and the imagined, working with historical processes not out of nostalgia, but as a way to probe the physicality of the image.
He seeks not to fix the world in place, but to activate it. His images do not resolve; they resonate.
Following its presentation at a ppr oc he Paris in 2024 and at the latest edition of Les Rencontres d'Arles, Alexandre Dupeyron's project Ashes of the Future is being presented for the first time in Italy, at Lab 1930.
The exhibition features four works from the Pinus Pinaster series (2022-2023) and twelve from Hapax (2024). Both series belong to the broader project that gives the exhibition its title - an inquiry born of the artist's reflections on the catastrophic wildfires that have swept through Australia, France, and the United States in recent years.
Fire is investigated in its destructive dimension within an ecological discourse linked to the Anthropocene. However, the complexity of its symbolism also leads Dupeyron to explore its transformative nature. Fire thus becomes a Promethean metaphor: a source of both devastation and knowledge, to become also a source of re-generation and, in his photographs, of creation.
In Pinus Pinaster, ashes are not only the subject of the works, but also the expressive medium. Dupeyron experiments with Gum Bichromate (or Gum Dichromate), using as pigment the charcoal from trees that were burned in fires in the southern French region of Gironde in 2022. The ashes become traces and evidence of a past that no longer exists, oscillating constantly between visibility and invisibility.
Hapax also uses the Gum Bichromate technique. This photographic printing process was particularly popular between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, coinciding with the heyday of Pictorialism and Robert Demachy's experiments. The technique enables the creation of unique pieces that can be customised each time, with the artist's creative imprint playing a decisive role. Attracted by the variations in light explored by both photography and Impressionism, Dupeyron oscillates between photography and painting, giving life to blurred images of an equally elusive nature.
Just as the cross-sections of burnt Pinus pinaster tree trunks evoke the cyclical nature of history, so Hapax is inspired by nature's rebirth after destruction.
Alexandre Dupeyron writes:
