The installation Golem is an invitation to an imaginary journey, a reflection on the desire and power of creation.

The Jewish myth Golem inspired the title. In Hebrew, Golem means "formless". The Golem is an artificial being created from clay and animated by the power of the Word. The installation consists of three "pillars" on which are of laid flat three 40cmX40cm prints. Spotlights illuminate the photographs where three faces emerge. I use natural elements such as flour, sand or black pigment to imprint human faces. These latter are re-interpreted by our gaze. The half-lite surroundings highlight the installation suggesting a sacred place. There are three pillars that could be considered as three “axis mundi”; three sorts of poles that capture our gaze and connect us to another dimension or another era.

This installation invites the viewer to approach and lean forward. May be a humility’s posture or Narcissus contemplating his image in the water? The viewer's body posture and movement are the same as those of the original model. The imprint is a kind of corporal memory, an "impression" of the body’s density, of its weight in and on the world.

In this physical proximity to the image, a new look is summoned, a haptic look that is understood here as giving the eye the "possibility to touch", to “caress” as the hand would. The contrasts and the nuances between the blurry and the sharp zones makes the faces’ matter appear and creates a presence, a shape that catches our eye. The play on light allows the hollowness of the original imprint to protrude thus creating either a face or a mask depending on the viewer. This revelation of a shape by these mechanisms gives a feeling, a sensation that these "masks", often considered as mortuary, are alive. This illusion is amplified by the use of textured paper chosen for its tactile and organic feel. The light enhances not only the paper’s texture but also the grain’s matter, thus triggering certain sensuality. This pushes the viewer to come and take a closer look, and triggers the desire to touch them with our eyes.

The trace is a metaphor for photography. The act of photography is an attempt to imprint reality with light. It is also an attempt to freeze the "it has been," (le « ça a été »), a point in time. To quote Rosalind Krauss in Le photographique - pour une théorie des écarts, the image produces another kind of sign resulting from a direct writing of light, an impression, a trace: an index. Photography is a space where index is reproduced: what happens when one transgresses the photography’s indexical function? What kind of image do we get when the referent is exhausted?

From one medium to another, I tried to exhaust the index referent inherent to all photographs while trying to recreate a sensual sensation. My original matrix (a person’s face) generates a new form which itself gives birth to a new matrix. These traces gradually lose their index references by successive alterations. With time the images get closer to what one could describe as an acheiropoietic image, an image that wasn’t made by human hands, a kind of divine image. I am referring to the Shroud, those marks left by Christ, a subtle combination of a "near" and a "distant" that Walter Benjamin called the aura. Benjamin describes this latter as: " The unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be". My work seems to be a kind of visual relic that comes from a faraway mythical time.