Artistic motivation

Albert Picard (born in 1955) lived the first thirty-six months of his life in an orphanage, waiting, at an age when it is not possible to know or understand what is happening. His adoptive family, from Normandin, has been his home for all his years since, until his late teens. His artistic practice and creation are rooted in that time and take hold of the territory he inhabits, a bias he maintains to this day. While trying to understand and live with his inner world, he becomes aware of his history in order to distance himself from it.

Everyone has their own story, but for Albert it is only a selective version of reality. If he identified with it, this story would amount to a mechanical and repetitive life. He is often comforted by this type of narration which makes it difficult to establish a correlation between a rather banal and predictable biographical scenario and the individual who is infinitely more complex.

Artistically, this has led him to challenge what the world has allowed to be seen in an almost hegemonic way, to realize that there is more to the world than what our eyes say. The revelation of what is really happening and the things we don’t see, the unspoken, what is hidden behind the scene, the circulation of things that creates a structure, all this determines our environment and seems to him extremely interesting to reveal.

His photographic playground is associated with poetry, where the real stories lie, as he seeks to create felt images that address and caress them. He develops arrangements of images and words, not the visible territory. His relationship with photographs or poetry dispenses with the real, which only serves as a threshold for inspiration. But this entails a risk, because if we think about it, what is in his mind is necessarily in his body. And since this body finds its place in the real, we come to consider that these images have a real existence. What the observer of his photographs sees unfolding, is actually unfolding.

From this way of considering his research, he can develop a technique of analysis of what we, human beings, are, of what does not separate us from the territory. He places himself on a springboard allowing him to project himself onto the outside world and try to understand how the world works.

His photographs live in fiction and reality, in promiscuity with our world. His poetry allows him to invent all the stories. Nature has forged us because she loves stories.