Éric Poitevin

A former student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Metz, Eric Poitevin lives and works in Mangiennes, a village in the Meuse, in the Lorraine region of France.

In 1988, Eric Poitevin won the Grand Prix National des Arts Plastiques Jeunes Telents for his photographic work. In 1990, he was an artist in residence at the Villa Medicis.

He presents his photographs, sometimes developed as large format photos, in carefully constructed groups. His images do not have a defined temporality. Images of ponds and undergrowth, dead deer or portraits, illustrate his artistic work. "I prefer to start with something simple and make it more complex. A sort of initiation". He adds, "every photograph is a montage". His are because they let time settle in. When time passes, something always slipsin, "just discrete things, on the register of meditation, and not on the register of proof."

Whether he chooses faces-World War I veterans (1985), nuns and cardinals (Rome, 1990)-dead deer (1993), skulls "seen from the back" (1994), a butterfly collection (1994), swamps (1987), undergrowth (1995), the hindquarters of horses (1999-2000), trees (1999-2000), marrow bones (2000), the fragility of things rises to the surface of his images.

(The citations are taken from Fragments d'un abécédaire, an interview between Eric Poitevin and Pascal Convert. Actes Sud, 1997).