Eric Poitevin エリック・ポワトヴァン

Based in the Meurthe-et-Moselle department, not far from his native Meuse in northeastern France, photographer Eric Poitevin has created his own unique photographic world. Since the mid-1980s, he has continued to produce meticulously composed photographs with his own style and sense of time, taking up typical subjects of Western classical painting. His outdoor landscapes, especially forests, feature luxuriant vegetation covering the entire surface of the frame, with the horizon line almost completely obliterated. Excessive staging and lighting effects are stripped away to present the shapes and growth process of the vegetation just as they are, in perfectly composed images that allow the viewer to encounter the space and time as if being led into the forest. His portraits and still lifes, set against the white background of the studio, make the most of the large margins, and the subjects, whether people or things, appear in an abstracted time-space, as if the surface of the image had been punctured. His still-life photographs of withering plant branches standing upright, and the vanitas of skulls lined up with toys and fruit, capture the ambiguous realm where organic matter loses its vitality and passes into the inorganic.

Poitevin’s works, especially his studio photographs, capture his subjects as sculptures, but he seems to aim for flatness. Many of his photographs are taken from directly above or directly to the side, with almost no perspective. To further enhance this effect, he avoids excessive shading, mainly through the use of non-directional lighting, so that the shape and existence of each object is expressed just as it is, with no hierarchical ranking among the pictured objects.

The exhibition’s Japanese title, Ryōbō, is a Zen term that means detachment from dichotomies: forgetting dualities that divide the world, forgetting oppositions between two sides. Rather than simply forgetting opposing elements, Poitevin’s ryōbō creates a distinctive time and space through an arrangement meticulously constructed over a long period of time, appealing to us with a new perspective, free from the dichotomies of reality.

Text by Kei Osawa (Researcher, The University Museum, The University of Tokyo)