Lucien Pelen practices photography as a technique of wisdom, as a man who asks himself questions about the world and his place in it. All the actions he fixes on film show a character (the artist himself) in the great experimental space that is nature, often a vast, deserted spot in the Lozère or Cévennes regions. Lucien constructs the landscape as a space of articulation between different scales: an expanse, a fragment of field, an environment where the small unfolds in the large and the large participates in the small. The relationship between these two elements (man and nature) is essential for the artist, who sees in it the possibility of circulation, of a link to be activated between the inner mental space and the outer environmental space.
If the photographic medium is at the heart of the gesture, Lucien’s practice places it at the edge of the image or in a congruent portion of space: he is in an expanded field of photography. The way he intervenes in the frame does not place the viewer in contemplation, but in the intuition of an elsewhere: there is always, beyond us, another space. If this artistic gesture appears as a minimal presence, it is maintained in a relationship of disproportion with space, and these absurd, restrained interventions form an art without logic that reveals the beauty of our passage through the landscape.
