Antoine Rose

Navagio Study 1

2022

UP IN THE AIR Series – Antoine Rose has commenced working on “Up in the Air” series in 2002, while he was shooting the Kitesurfing World Cup in Rio de Janeiro; being perfectionist, he dedicated a couple of years on refining his ideas. The “Up in the air” series have received a very warm welcome from the audience. His works are mostly oversized photographs, mounted with a patented Diasec process. They offer panoramas captured from a bird’s eye view. There is always a contrast between these two registers, horizontally or vertically arranged: the irregular field of the calm or whirling ocean, in a blue-green color, on the one hand, and the regular register of the beach, where tanned people and artifacts – parasols, beach sheets and towels, or sunbeds – add a variety of natural and respectively industrial colors, on the other hand. Because of the aerial distance, these elements appear as small geometric patterns or puzzle pieces dispersed on the yellowish white sand of the sun-soaked beach surface or like a polka dot design on an immense fabric. The oversized photographs thus oblige the viewer to have a closer look in order to distinguish what they really represent. With regard to this aspect, Rose’s powerful camera allows for the highest resolution even for the smallest detail. These miniature-like representations transform the natural aerial landscapes into abstract paintings and inscribe Rose’s works in a minimalist artistic approach. The artist introduces a tension between real and virtual, between what it seems to be seen and what it is really seen, between the visible and the hidden. Besides the aesthetic dimension, there is an anthropological and sociological layer to reading Rose’s photographs: people sharing common behaviors and exposing themselves like hedonistic herds. The stills of people swimming, surfing or just sitting down on their beach pads suggests a showcase or, given the distance, an insectarium. One can even see a religious connotation: the bird’s eye view makes people seem insignificant dots in the infinite space of the universe, crushed by the immensity of the water field, recalling the biblical universal flood; seen from the sky, like through god’s eyes, people and nature coexist in harmonic or tense relationships. Displayed on the wall of the gallery, the horizontal surfaces of the beach and of the ocean seen from above switch to a vertical plane, thus disturbing the viewer’s frontal perception. It is only through the mental process that the viewer perceives that the images were shot in a bird’s eye view. In this way, the artist relies on the public’s active participation and receptivity. Roses’s photographs can be found in prestigious private and corporate collections and are part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Arts and Design (NY, USA).