A. Vincent Fournier

Vincent Fournier belongs to the generation of artists for whom photography is a speculative tool and a way of exploring scientific imagery, telling stories of our technological utopias and inventing possible worlds. His approach borrows equally from the codes of documentary and cinema, speculative architecture and science fiction. What interests him is not so much what things are, but what they could become, seeing fragments of the future in reality.

Since the early 2000s, Vincent Fournier has built a cohesive universe, fed by fascination for scientific stories and modernist utopias. Each of his series is designed like a chapter in a personal cosmogony, simultaneously intellectual and poetic, where humans search to find their place in the universe.

In this vein, we also find Flora Incognita, a selection from which is exhibited for Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire. The title of this series is borrowed from scientific vocabulary and refers to non-identified plants, imaginary species and botanical forms not yet categorised. And yet, the images are neither documentary nor pure invention. They belong to a space in the middle, between reality and artifice, where plants become a territory for aesthetic and symbolic exploration. Each plant seems to rise out of a parallel world, simultaneously plausible and unreal, as if nature itself had been changed, augmented or projected into the future.

The Flora Incognita project proposes a transposition of our botanical heritage onto planets beyond the solar system. At the intersection between art and science, this speculative herbarium imagines forms of plant life capable of adapting to extraterrestrial ecosystems. In this dialogue between the terrestrial plant world and its extraterrestrial counterparts, the echo of our planet’s climate crisis resonates.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES