The Vitrines series of photographs, initiated in 2008, was produced in Paris during the economic crisis that led to numerous shop closures. Photographed from the street, the windows, covered in whiting, no longer allow us to see inside the shops. Instead, they draw our gaze to the abstract form of the paint and the reflection of the urban environment on its surface. As a link between inside and outside, these images of shop windows explore the boundaries between photography and painting, figuration and abstraction, documentation and trompe l’oeil. The scale of the photographs, printed in large formats, affords the spectator two visions: the possibility of being enveloped and immersed in the image, or of experiencing a tableau-like form from a distance.
In the context of an urban landscape in perpetual transformation, these windows embody a liminal and transitory space. From transparency to opacity, the surface of the glass becomes the locus for the inscription of a history and the substrate for a meaningful visual gesture. Here, between two uses of commerce and within the framework of the shop window, an anonymous person has become a painter to condemn one vision and propose another.