Maxime Fauconnier
is a visual artist living and working in Brussels, Belgium. Oscillating between photography, film, found images, and poetry, his work strives to magnify the tiny elements of existence to provide a bridge to a slowed-down, contemplative and inaccessible world, while exploring one’s mental health struggles and subsequent yearning for an escape. Whether it is mental or literal, the escape is constant in his practice, particularly through the representation of transitional moments between two states.
“My emphasis of slowness and stillness is central to my practice. I am interested in building still and contemplative scenes, with the pacing generating a peculiar sense of suspense or even eeriness out of what would otherwise be rather mundane moments. By doing so, I encourage the viewer to look attentively at the image to see below the surface, in between the layers, eventually risking to enter unknown territory. Having never been interested in binary classifications, if I have one wish with my practice, it is to create “interstice” narratives: in their form as well as in their content, while using a porous and inter-connected approach between disciplines.”
Luciferin
2020 — ongoing
Inspired by the bioluminescence emitted by some living organisms, the images of the ongoing series "Luciferin" reveal the possible spellbinding nature of the most mundane subjecta and offer a new and intriguing way of looking at landscapes, as if they were seen outside of the human visible spectrum.
The Dragon’s Tail
2021
Video installation, 6’36’’, looped
“For my film "The Dragon’s Tail", I wrote and recorded my reading of a visually dense poem, overflowing with descriptions of textures, characters, and locations, before transcribing it into subtitles over a black screen. Beyond the voice-over narration, the landscape is absent: the black screen - a film recording of a black panel, in fact - and its static-like digital noise evoke an image being shaped as the piece progresses, threatening to surge at any moment.
The voice reciting the poem is ethereal yet distorted, saturated as if sharing a secret through a walkie-talkie or during radio transmission. Although the viewer is denied visual identification with the narrator or the subject, the voice seemingly possesses the ability to move through time and space. Reflecting on our collective visual memory and shared experience of immobility during the Covid-19 pandemic, the piece dips into the world’s endless sensory possibilities while questioning if imagining something can be as truthful as experiencing it in reality.”
For the ongoing text-based works that I like to call "screenplay poems", I revisit and play with the short stories or film screenplays that I've written over the years but never directed or published. Borrowing from the screenplay's specific visual vocabulary, I erase parts of the stories to create floating poems, creating brand new narratives.
‘One's Island’
2010 — ongoing
Initiated in 2010, “One’s Island” is a photography project focused on symbolizing the youth’s disconnection with the rest of society through a constellation of contemplative vignettes, mapping together the territory of an illusory island.
The island enters in dialogue with portraits of adolescents as well as still life, captured during my search for beauty in the most prosaic and ordinary places. Blending spontaneous capturing with composed cinematic tableaux, I juxtapose these scenes to the island landscapes to demonstrate that their strength is fully revealed in the presence of each other - as if layered on top of each other; connected by invisible seams.
All this dust between you and me
2015 — ongoing
“All this dust between you and me” is a photography series studying one’s distancing from their environment due to mental health struggles. The captured out-of-focus scenes, ranging from delicate still lives to imposing landscapes, convey this removal while striving to reach a vivid painterly-like quality.
To see Maxime’s full collection visit his website:
https://www.maximefauconnier.com/works