Les Villes Artificielles

About the collection

Les Villes Artificielles form an imaginary geography of abandoned cities, ruined monuments and architectures whose origins and functions seem to have been lost. These landscapes recall the architectural capriccios of Francesco Guardi, the ruins of Hubert Robert and the visionary architecture of Piranesi. In each of these representations, architecture breaks free from its historical reality to become a space for mental projection.

Like architectural capriccios, these images bring together fragments of different places and eras in spaces that never existed. The ruins do not necessarily bear witness to a past catastrophe: they seem to belong to a world in suspension, where civilisations succeed one another, disappear and are reborn without end. The past sometimes takes on the appearance of a distant future, as if time had stopped moving in a single direction.

These imaginary cities thus have an ambiguous relationship with utopia. They depict impossible places, set outside history, which can evoke the remains of a lost paradise as much as the promise of a world to come. The ruin is no longer only a sign of disappearance, but also of a possible rebirth. It holds both the memory of what once was and the possibility of what might yet emerge.

Les Villes Artificielles thus appear as fragments of a mythology with no clear origin: places that seem to have always existed, destined to disappear and reappear in a movement that recalls the myth of eternal return. Not the vestiges of a world irretrievably lost, but images of a world that never stops beginning again.