Photographic art: "La route sans fin".
Artist: Jean-Thomas Bédard.
2021, route 138, Basse côte-Nord , Québec, Canada.
Theme: Nature, : micro landscape, rock, low tide, shore, seashore, littoral, St. Lawrence River, St. Lawrence Estuary, foreshore, flats.
Technique: Digital composition from merged photographs.
Original size : 36 x 24 inches
Reproduction format: 18 x 12 inches / 45.72 x 30 x 48 cm, 24 x 16 inches / 60.96 cm x 40.64 cm and 36 x 24 inches / 91.44 x 60.96 cm.
Dominant colors: Grey, green, mauve, brown.
Hanging system included:
Floating frame
Artist's interpretation of the work:
''La route sans fin'' could also have been called Route 138 or Point de fuite. It's an incredible road, almost mythical given the colossal challenges involved in its construction, that runs along the Lower North Shore in eastern Quebec, through immense peat bogs and black spruce forests. It's a straight road to infinity in an inhospitable environment, freezing in winter and infested with mosquitoes in summer. It's this harshness that I wanted to depict in this photographic composition, which transforms Route 138 into a stone-paved road, by superimposing an image of a rocky surface with a very uneven relief that unfolds hues ranging from warm to cold. At the end of the road, a glimmer of light appears as a sign of hope.
La route sans fin - Jean-Thomas Bédard
As an artist and committed environmentalist, Bédard creates exclusively with materials from nature, exploring the variables of an intimate geography that feeds on his sense of belonging to the territory.
For the past decade, he has traveled the shores of the St. Lawrence and its estuary, an emblematic place par excellence that has nourished the Quebecois imagination, to capture its essence. Using the shapes and textures captured on his coastline, the artist-photographer creates imaginary spaces, a kind of metaphor for the ties that humans maintain with their territory.
His work is divided into several series, each characterized by an original visual treatment. They evolve from micro-landscapes to digital collages evoking totemic figures or primitive deities, then turn to the fusion of several images to create a surreal or symbolic world. His vision is poetic and holistic, and his practice seeks to build bridges between nature and humanity. He invites us to transform our gaze from the narrative of human domination over nature to that of a collaborative nature of which human beings are as much a part as all other living beings.