MIRLEFT, the village to the left of the sea *

From a nocturnal wandering in the heart of a southern Moroccan village, which should look like a postcard from a small seaside town, a diffuse feeling of disorientation arises.

Here, the structures oppose each other by profound darkness and illumination, which then ruptures any reference to time.

The urban landscape of Mirleft is transformed into Lynchian film sets, timeless, and distorted, between dream and reality. These poetic scenes are where my favorite themes, the mystical, the strange, the supernatural, memory and melancholia, intersect.

The pale lights and the deserted streets will become my choice of places to photograph at dusk.

When the sun sets, the canvas transforms and reveals these fleeting spaces in this dance of artificial luminescence that comes to sculpt the night.

Then begins a journey through this silent, timeless, and mysterious city, in which Mirleft seems to be the end of the world.

Losing myself in the heart of this place, floating like a sleepwalker, I paint using the city lights, screaming and dissonant, which are outrageously made up. These lights reconstruct a fantasized landscape. This is where the absence of any human presence emphasizes the aspect of ghostly and vertiginous places.

Blocks gather and collide, the resulting vibration spreading into my images.

Capturing the light hanging from these buildings is capturing the brutal silence of the place, which seems to seek sleep in this acid night.

* "the village to the left of the sea" is a suggested Wikipedia translation of the name Mirleft.