TITLE: Still Lifes and Vanitas

Despite the apparent contradiction, it didn't seem so absurd to me, when I began this project in early 2009, to practice still life by taking snapshots.

Indeed, this genre requires the artist to carefully arrange various elements and choose lighting, which I decided to let be presented to me, and, on the contrary, not to intervene at all in the creation of these still lifes. Cemeteries in Paris and the provinces met my expectations, and it was Père-Lachaise that first revealed to me, amidst the bustle, the particular charm emanating from the bouquets of artificial flowers and the impromptu arrangements created by visitors.

In this way, I freed myself from the constraints of a purely stylistic exercise and also gave myself the opportunity to "compose" Vanitas paintings, very much in vogue in 17th-century art, which served to remind ordinary mortals of the precariousness and vanity of our condition. However, one will not find skeletons or skulls, at least not superficially, in this work to remind us of our inevitable end, but rather evocations of our fragility or the brevity of youth and life, using objects, plants, shadows, or fruits framed in eloquent situations.

Here, all the flowers are artificial, except for those produced by chance. They lie with a certain charm, and, strangely, it is the oldest ones that seem the most real to me. These flowers participate in the ritual of "passage" and serve as "true-false" passports to the afterlife.

Along the way, it became clear to me that I was treading on delicate ground: we live in a sanitized world where death is taboo. We cultivate the paradox of displaying it constantly, as violently as possible, while simultaneously remaining silent about it, even banishing it from family life through the hospital.

AUTHOR: Bernard Drouillet (France)

Born in Paris in 1954, Bernard Drouillet divides his life between music and photography from the 1980s, after an education marked by the Latin Quarter, the Lycée Henri Quatre and the Sorbonne.
Alongside a career as a jazz drummer who led him to play and record with various French and American musicians, he became passionate about photography in the late 1970s and in 1992 studied at the Centre de Formation et de Documentation (CFD) in Paris to become a photojournalist.

An independent photo-reporter from 1992 to 1998, he distributed his work in colour through the agencies Sipa and Editing until 2006, with various magazine press releases such as Nouvel Observateur, Actuel, l'Express, V S D, La Vie and others.
It was during a collective exhibition at the UPC (Union of Creative Photographers) (Paris France) in 1997, that he will show for the first time his personal work in black and white.