The images of photographer Christine Lefebvre appear more anchored to the body than to language. They resemble magnetic fields converging forces, affecting their senses and directions. The artist unfolds them between the pages of a book she has constructed like a poem, with blank spaces exposing them to the opening of meaning. The photographs are visions torn from the flow of time. During her walks, far from the city and people, what the photographer feels rising like sap upon touching a tree, a cliff, or a glacier is captured freehand, in a few seconds and through impulsive fragments.

The choice of the bird as the protagonist of her chronicles stems from the memory of reading a famous Persian mystical tale written in the 11th century. The Conference of the Birds tells the epic journey of a group of lost birds in search of truth. The photographs present timeless landscapes punctuated by the flapping wings of birds, contrasting with the solid reliefs of petrified landscapes.

She is the “dream of stone” evoked by Baudelaire, a witness to a revolution where the earth, the primal source of all creation, lost its aura and solidified into an object. Lefebvre’s work is an elegy, but also composes an ode to a nature that restores the bonds with cycles and the rhythm of seasons.
[Excerpts] Marguerite Pilven