Artistic approach
“I want to transmit a certain sense of time... the slowness we feel when we sit on the grass and take the time to watch the sun rise or set. Nature’s time. In all my work, there is this need to slow down; to take the time to pass from the act of “looking” to the feeling of “seeing”. It is hard to transmit this in a public place, where people only spend a few minutes, or even a few seconds, looking at a piece of art. The aim here is to stop the observer just long enough for them to realise that the image is not static, that it evolves, and that if you stop for a moment, you can enter another space-time which is not on the same scale as our daily lives where we are swamped by endless images... this world where we look at a lot of things without seeing anything... I offer the opposite... I invite people to not look at very much so that they can finally see all the details.” Jeffrey Blondes
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Jeffrey Blondes has a fruitful career as a photographer and painter behind him, with over 40 solo exhibitions in galleries all over the world – but the past 14 years have been given over to the creation of 24-, 52- and 74-hour videos in high definition. These videos take an approach that anyone familiar with the rest of his work will recognise: observing, waiting and recording the subtleties of nature.
He has always been concerned with studying the intersection of the landscape and everything that the French word “temps” encompasses: time, climate, seasons, their rhythm and their cycle.
Jeffrey Blondes’ “temps” allows the patient observer to progress to a level where he or she begins to see and feel the time go by and perceive the rotation of the Earth. In this state of contemplation, the onlooker can become one with the sparse elements of the countryside and feel a sense of “timelessness” that he or she is unable to experience in the hectic world of urban life.
Working in direct contact with nature, Jeffrey Blondes makes the onlooker privy to the experience of actually being there. Always done outdoors, from life, his work is seldom reworked, presenting us with the recording of authentic events… live.
