What do we really know about the strange world lurking in the depths of the ocean? Not much, decidedly, while the sea represents more than 70% of the surface of our planet. Our representations of underwater spaces are poor and repetitive, often stemming from the same clichés: divers in search of exploits, mysterious animals covered with scales or tentacles, exotic lagoons populated by multicolored fish.
Nicolas Floc’h decided to make the missing images himself, treating the seabed not like an aquarium, but like a landscape. His black and white photos, taken only a few meters from the French coast, offer surprising visions: off the island of Ouessant, the kelps are tight in an inextricable jungle or undulate gracefully like ribbons. Near the island of Molène, himanthales let their endless hair trail in the waves. The surface of the water becomes a shimmering sky while on the ground, as far as the eye can see, stretches a vast meadow of algae.
The beginning of the sea
Abstract forms, touches of the marvelous… The artist skilfully plays with different registers to sow fiction and magic in these troubled waters, causing a ghost flag or a witch’s head to emerge in the middle of an enchanted seaweed forest. The few fish encountered in these places are never the stars of these immense spaces where it is the water, its turbidity, its movement and its composition, which decides the presence or absence of species. “These are places inhabited by a discreet life, explains the artist. A glass of water can contain millions of living beings! » He has also entitled “Productive landscapes” his long-term work on marine areas, as these ecosystems are rich in phytoplankton, an element at the base of the food chain.
To achieve these images, the artist, who was a fisherman in a previous life, dived in apnea or with a bottle all around the Breton peninsula. He is exhibiting them this fall at the Center d’art Gwinzegal, in Guingamp, under the title “Initium maris” (“the beginning of the sea”), like a snub to the name given to Finistère – the end of the land. But Brittany, where he evolves like a fish in water, is only the latest step in a global project, which he first led in Japan and the Mediterranean and around which he federated scientists from Ifremer, the National Museum of Natural History or the Wimereux Marine Station.
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