Jean-Claude Bélégou Diversions :GEOMETRIES 2026

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Series of self-portraits synchronized with geometric measuring and drafting instruments. Ongoing series

The average person often imagines that photography, even more than painting or drawing, is a matter of the subject of a motif, of the beauty of the latter, of its extra-ordinary, picturesque, amusing, social, documentary character...

And that art, as is unfortunately too often taught to secondary school students, delivers messages (I will have to be told what message in a still life by Chardin or a portrait by Renoir do, by the way) as the web or the press, advertising, men of power and communication do, with all their might and to the point of knocking us out.

This is to forget that photography is not an art, but a technique, and that the artistic use of photography only begins where its pragmatic functions such as they are the epithasis of press or documentary, family or holiday photography cease. That art is above all a matter of form, volumes, colors, compositions etc... not a "subject".

So there are poor subjects, the self-portrait for example, poor because the artist has himself at hand, so to speak (thus a certain number of self-portraits in the history of art have their origin in the absence of models, in the inability of the poor artist to "afford them"). Poor because obviously it is not the picturesque or the exoticism of the subject that prevails! Poor but rich because it is sometimes, in Rembrandt or Bonnard or Florence Henri for example, the opportunity for formal experiments that would have no place in any other relationship to the model.

These geometries, a very defined device of temporal decomposition, starting again although different from the one experimented in the past in film in my series The Glory of the World, with some accessories related to the "compass in the eye"!

Colors digital, print with archival inks 60 x 75 cm printed by the artist, limited editions, delivered matted, numbered and signed.