Lavis (2007) Photography by Eric Millet

Eric Millet is a photographer. Although… In view of his work, the viewer does not recognize the photographic tool: he sees first of all images, lines, colors… The public generally believes at first sight that it is a painting technique.

Why this ambiguity? Because Eric Millet's photographs are not “shots” in the proper sense. The artist, a graduate of the school of fine arts, uses the techniques and supports of photography, but without producing clichés: his "images" as he calls them, are freed from their role of re-production. They are abstract works, obtained by working on photographic materials: baths, paper, film, and light are thus diverted from their primary function, in an innovative creative alchemy.

Of his works, he speaks little. First, out of shyness. And then because he refuses to be an art theoretician: for him, the artist does not have to support his productions with a conceptual aesthetic discourse. The artist does not give to think, but to see. It therefore leaves thinkers their domain, and reserves the right to silence: it remains in visual expression, leaving discourse and artistic theorizing to aestheticians.

After his studies in the fine arts, he begins to work, to research, but very discreetly. It is only recently that he began to exhibit his works. In the meantime, the digital image has imposed itself on everyone: it is time for him to propose a new "category" of photos: faced with the countless clichés produced by the century of the image, he can use the "photo », rid it of its informative task and invest it with an aesthetic approach. Faced with the millions of pixels that any camera now provides, and the billions of images generated in bursts by a world thirsty for the visual, he sees the opportunity to recover old techniques, and to invest them with a more graphic. "No longer to report, but simply to show..."

We can say, in this sense, that Eric Millet is more of a photographer than a photographer.

His exhibition at the Illustré in January 2007, in Troyes in the Aube, unfolds in two “bursts”:

The large formats come directly from the silver period, and are indebted to new techniques only for enlargement. We find there, either images that did not require a negative, or “manual” work on the negative itself. Nothing was “photographed” in the traditional sense of the term. It was in the dark of the laboratory that the work was entirely carried out. The result is striking, with an asserted originality.

A second series presents smaller formats. These are compositions obtained this time from digital shots. “I am led to question myself about the supports, and to question the definition of the image itself. It seems to me that our century is favorable to...

• Nationality: FRANCE
• Date of birth : unknown date
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary French Artists