Eric Bourret, the Romantic

Eric Bourret (b. 1964) is a Romantic, in the historical sense of the term. And his recent works, in which skies loom large, provide a clear example of this. One might identify Romanticism with an age when photography did not yet exist; but that would mean ignoring the memorial function of skies in connecting up times and places. Bourret is also a walker-photographer who climbs summits in order to produce his works. In this respect, Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818, and Romantic literature in general, are obvious references.
For the Romantics, our lives are journeys strewn with pitfalls, during which we learn to know ourselves. And we are an integral part of nature. The skies are mirrors of our emotions and feelings, and of the world's instability. In the same way that writer-travellers like Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Sand and Nerval talked about the infinity of the sky in terms of memories or dreams, Bourret has been striding ever higher for twenty-five years, not recording traces of his passage as such (unlike Richard Long, or, more recently, Francis Alÿs), but simply photographing the surrounding elements: earth and clouds. And the parallel with literature is all the more apt in that he sees walking as "a philosophical act and a spiritual experience". He says, in fact, that after walking for some days, "distinctions between the self and the landscape begin to fade. Photography transcribes the flows that animate the landscape, like those that animate our bodies." For Bourret, the human being is one with the landscape, as in the case of Friedrich or Chateaubriand; and he transmits this to the viewer, who is projected into the large formats of his images, thereby sharing his quasi-mystical experience.
The history of painting abounds in representations of the sky. And photography, for its part, comprises as many scientific as artistic images. From the astronomical photographs of Jules Janssen (1824-1907) to the starry skies of Thomas Ruff (b. 1956), via Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), sky, stars, moon, sun and clouds have been the objects of innumerable studies, and a source of inspiration, both poetical and mystical. For Stieglitz, clouds were a reflection of inner life, as they were for the Romantic painters. His Equivalents (1925-1932), which he created in the grounds of the family home at Lake George, were views of clouds that he saw as "external equivalents to what had already taken shape within me". Like him, Eric Bourret has chosen a luminous centre of which there is no knowing whether it is the sun or the moon, so that a lingering doubt remains. Is it diurnal or nocturnal? The form-content and black-white contrasts may suggest yawning chasms (Baudelaire's "spleen") or celestial heights (Victor Hugo's flamboyant romanticism). There are images that capture the dynamic aspect of a nebulous trail that dilates as it rises, like "the gigantic swell of the skies". These rising forms, and the resulting sense of infinitude, call out for an emancipation of the soul from matter and mass (as in Victor Hugo's poetry); which is what Bourret means when he talks about "the materials of the spaces traversed… the depths of the elements, and their transience… the metamorphosis of matter." This is the metamorphosis that turns clouds into boiling foam. An inversion takes place, with a confusion of references. Verticality can signify soaring, but also plummeting. It recalls the myth of Icarus, and the dream of humans transformed into angels – an archetypal Romantic yearning.
Eric Bourret is an "artist walker" who feels the rhythms of nature in the depths of his being. He gets as close as possible to "the light", so as to "look out over the mist of knowledge". In a sense, he is a 21st-century wanderer above a sea of clouds…

Emmanuelle de l'Écotais, 2014
Curator at the Photography Department of the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris

Translation : John Doherty
In Théorie du nuage. Pour une histoire de la peinture, 1972, Hubert Damish describes three "functions" of skies.
See Richard Long, Walking a Line in Peru, 1972, and Francis Alÿs, Magnetic Shoes, 1994. As regards "artist walkers", see Dominique Baqué, Histoires d'ailleurs, 2006.
See "Itinéraire d'un piéton d'altitude", an interview with Isabelle Bourgeois, in Trace, autumn-winter 2011-2012.
Ibid.
"When the low, heavy sky weighs like iron".
In Victor Hugo, "Dieu".
Notably the poetics of the inner sky.
Given that he is from Marseille, one may well imagine that the Calanques have something to do with his love of walking, and of mountains.