Luc Médrinal

Luc Médrinal was born in Le Havre in 1966. He discovered photography at the age of 12 and was quickly fascinated by the magic of the laboratory, where he spent hours discovering the subtleties of printing. His years of apprenticeship are gained through encounters alongside studies in horticulture and landscaping.

Drawing an essential resource from nature, he undertakes work that attempts to make the energy of places defined by hostile specificities acceptable. Scorched lands, industrial landscapes, felled forests, nature in what Man makes of it. He uses film as a working medium, but also benefits from innovations in digital technology.

His pronounced taste for experimentation continually pushes his technical and sensitive field of investigation further. Training regularly completes and opens up his research, such as that carried out with the Danish engraver and photographer Henrik Boegh, on photopolymer photoengraving techniques, or that carried out with the Spanish bookbinder Luis Barrios, on the artist's book.

His photographic work is based on the intimate relationship he has with nature, and on the way in which he positions himself not in front of the landscape but in it. It is about the landscape perceived and felt with the whole body, it becomes an extension of what it is, and what it is transforms into an extension of what it looks at.

The landscape can be imposing, hostile, supportive or reassuring. It all depends on how you approach it. It then takes the form of a fleeting and evanescent vision, fragments, plots, furtive images, which reveal themselves in sensitive spaces.

Far from any form of exoticism, Luc Médrinal photographs what is close to him. In this intuitive approach, he seeks the trace, the index of presence, the spirit of the place, to make them readable and acceptable. The photographer tries to give it a personal and intimate vision. It is not a question of representing but rather of evoking, questioning and exploring. The eye does not stop on anything but absorbs the essential, it is a collaboration with the unconscious, the obsession to look in order to see beyond appearances.

The techniques that the photographer uses allow him a new translation of the decor, by attaching importance to the rendering and the poetic unity of each image. He remains attached to the use of the negative, to its specificity and to the experimental interventions that he can exercise in shooting and in the laboratory. These traditional photographic processes, mainly in black and white, combined with new non-toxic engraving processes offer him a wide range of possible translations and a vast field of experimental research.

Accident is often welcome and each picture teaches him the next.