The Galerie du 10 of the Instituto Francés in Madrid presents the solo photography exhibition From the sea to the ocean to the river by Nicolas Floc’h, ahead of the third United Nations Conference on the Ocean (UNOC), which is being held in Nice.
Through its images, the waters reveal a surprising diversity of landscapes, both for their colours and for the richness of their ecosystems. In the south of the Iberian Peninsula, Gibraltar is the point of passage between what is called the sea on the east coast of Spain and the ocean on the west coast. However, the ocean is only one, a single stretch of water that connects the Tagus with the Amazon, the Ebro with the Mississippi. These waters reveal a diversity of landscapes, both in their colour and in their ecosystems.
The French Institute will present photographs from several series: «Initium Maris», the inaugural series of «Productive landscapes»; «Invisible», a series on the Mediterranean; and «Deep Sea», focusing on the deep sea.
These works reveal the underwater landscapes of western and southern France, from the coasts of Brittany to the Alpes-Maritimes, and propose to fix through the image a state of the landscape at a given moment. The photographs, mostly in black and white, with natural light and wide angle, allow a panoramic approach to typologies of landscapes, large forests and coastal cliffs.
The series «The colour of water» (since 2016) reveals, under the surface, with natural light and wide angle, the nuances of ocean waters, seas, rivers and tributaries. Life is everywhere, interacting and determining this specificity of the underwater space, where the vanishing point of the landscape is not directed towards the horizon, but towards the monochrome.
Nicolas Floc’h is a photographer and visual artist born in 1970 in Rennes. His photographs explore a time of transition where flows, disappearance and regeneration occupy an essential place. For about fifteen years, he has been working on the representation of habitats and the marine environment, producing a photographic documentary linked to global changes and the definition of the underwater landscape.
