A Parisian photographer and Gozo

Cyril Sancereau is a French photographer from Paris, based in Malta. A student of architecture and graduate of Beaux Arts de Rennes, Cyril specialises in the photography of architecture and landscape.

His photographic work aims to document the impermanence and fragility of the landscape. Cyril focuses his attention on fragments of territory, where the metamorphosis and its ‘in-between’ are revealed.

He deliberately excludes all identifying features of place. By choosing to produce only autonomous images, detached from any context, he seeks to retain from his wanderings only traces of the fragile and ephemeral. He is more interested in the composition of his photographs, which reveal an abstract landscape evoking the loss of landmarks.

While creating his work in the footsteps of “artist walkers” and photographer-surveyors, he nevertheless relishes the notions of wandering, and consequent loss of orientation. Wandering implies the passage into different worlds; it is the mental transformation which that brings about in the individual that interests him. Step by step, this mental process provides a perspective, conducive to the return to oneself. With the rhythm of walking, thoughts move between the objective and the subjective; a dialogue between reality and one’s interpretation of it, which defines the way one experiences a place.

The act of random wandering amplifies the landscape experience, exalts the senses, and leads to profound changes in perception. With his images, Cyril tries to give a closer account of this visceral transformation of the subject in, and by, the place in which it evolves. Wandering allows one to let go and question one’s own physical, but also social and cultural, limits. It is a subjective encounter with an unfamiliar place arousing strong and sometimes contradictory emotions. Cyril wanders the landscape photographing fragments, the ‘almost nothing’,which question the passing of time and the difficulty of belonging, in a split second, to a particular place.

Residence Project

Cyril spent the month of February 2019 in Gozo, as an artist in residence, thanks to the financial support of the Ministry of Gozo and photographed the Gozo landscape. This work will be presented in an exhibition at Lazuli Art gallery.

On Gozo

Cyril has this to say about Gozo: “I visited Gozo for the first time 10 years ago. Then each summer, without fail, I returned for a few weeks where I could put my Parisian life in brackets. My only

wish was to arrive and deposit my baggage, material and spiritual, without losing a single minute... I have now been living in Malta for three years, but I have a special relationship with the island I see as magnetic. Today Gozo is still a landmark for me, a place where I feel good and can find myself.

In my artistic work walking is essential. All these years I have walked the Gozitan paths, often the same ones, each time discovering something different, or simply a detail revealing itself under another light. It was thanks to Gozo, amongst other places, that I became aware of the landscape’s perpetual movement. Perhaps simply because it is an island whose surface seems to extend beyond the coasts in summer and retreat into itself in winter when storms rage on the sea. Or perhaps it is the stone that forms it, so sensitive to erosion that the island seems to change visibly. The disappearance of the Azure Window reminds us every day that this territory is fragile, and its shape can change dramatically overnight. Gozo awakens in me not only a feeling of calm and serenity but also the feeling of an “inquiétante étrangeté” (“disturbing strangeness”). It is this contradiction that fascinates me and that I photograph tirelessly.

During my artist’s residency I walked alone around the island. My isolation, and immersion in nature, during these walks enabled me to return to myself. My photographs aim to give a closer account of this personal transformation. To focus more on the perception than on the subject, I deliberately chose the black and white, and the square, format, and excluded all specificities of place, in order to create an image out of time, geography and social construct. The composition, the texture and the light reveal an abstract and timeless landscape.”