PLAN LARGE - Interventions artistiques sur des anciens panneaux publicitaires au coeur de la ville. Une coproduction du Mois de la Photo à Montréal.

Presented in coproduction with Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal.

Michael Flomen explores light as a means of revelation and transformation of material. Night acts as his black chamber and the dialogue with natural elements (fire, water, snow…), as his inspiration. He reduces the subject to its purest essence for a creation in which visual and aesthetic powers are striking.

With his photogram The Blue Flyer II (2009), Michael Flomen renews the visual experiences of the pioneers of photography. Using photosensitive paper but no camera, he has captured the twinkling of fireflies at night. Their luminosity impregnates the surface of the paper, creating haphazard traces composed of phosphorescent points of light. Working as closely as possible to nature, Flomen reveals its imperceptible details and associates them with coloured tones. Located on a large-scale billboard in the core of Montreal, the resulting image of an abstract and microcosmic landscape blends in with the urban environment.

If Michael Flomen’s work is often considered as abstract, simple, poetic and minimalist, playing on the ambiguity and the subjectivity of perception and gaze (the visible and the invisible, the perceptible and the imperceptible), it yet remains no less of a message carrier, seeking meaning and truth.

Via the discovery of natural, simple and passionate phenomenon that exist all around us, the artist stimulates the gaze of others, “provoking reflection on oneself”, inciting to become interested in the genesis of the universe, the terms of our planet in the cosmos, as well as the effects of nature upon us, and on our moods.