“Bastien Santanoceto travels and photographs, the resulting images are beautiful, sometimes rough and always strangely silent. Images that say nothing but the minerality of the stone, the coldness of the ice or the breath of a storm.
From this obvious frontality to reality, from this sense of detail, it is an atlas of metaphysical forms, a corpus of panoramas and micro landscapes without scale, which bring us back to the origins of a virgin and volcanic nature, Iceland.
The printing of negative images on black paper with silver ink shows through a double technical inversion, these photographs in their simplest materiality, a purity of shapes and light.
You have to immerse yourself in this visual peregrination to feel over the pages the strange telluric attraction of these virgin landscapes from which sometimes emerge some fragile traces of human activity reduced to its simplest expression, a path, a telegraph wire, a tiny figure maybe. Nothing is certain… And through the visual purity to which Bastien Santanoceto submits, the reader begins to notice the dark mass of the photographic material, its negative. Thus the hollow composition of his images gives pride of place to voids and absence, "What we see is not made of what we see, but of what we are.” (Fernando Pessoa / The book of intranquility by Bernardo Soares / 1982.), these landscapes attest to this.“ RNVP