The Event Horizon

The images engage in a dialogue across time. They serve as bridges between the possible—because it was once experienced—and the impossible—because the person at the heart of the project is no longer here. All these images serve as objects of remembrance. Memories—sometimes enhanced—some project what might have been; others enrich an imaginary world and fill the void.

aside from that. That's where the series takes place The Event Horizon . Where the intimate and the emotional challenge the fragility of our existence. It is also absence that the photographer—the son of a father who chose to take his own life—sublimates. He sublimates it in an effort to better come to terms with it.

Here, “sublimating” is never synonymous with “idealizing.” That is what makes this approach so powerful. The work, the journey, and the creative act are revealed and shaped through the process of reading, rereading, and contextualizing texts left behind (though the word “left behind” hardly does them justice) by a father who could do nothing but survive by perceiving, like no other, the fragility of the human condition. This ability to broaden the scope of perception is undoubtedly one of the legacies—one of the character traits—shared by both of them.

Constantly hovering between dreamlike imagery and realism, Jérôme Coton’s work— a tangled web of archival images, film and digital photographs—sometimes retouched with artificial intelligence, always imbued with emotion—belongs to the realms of visual art, documentary art, and the personal diary… but above all, it is an act of love. A remedy for melancholy, as if to better make each of these memories an anchor, the foundation for a new possibility, by paying homage to and doing justice to a terrible earthly journey—that of a father… unlike any other.

Text by Ludovic Broquart, author and painter