Jours blancs evokes the brightness of the nights beyond the polar circle, on the Lofoten Islands in Norway. This series, produced to the rhythm of the midnight sun—that almost metaphysical night one encounters in the Nordic latitudes—sustains that rare phenomenon, that of the eternal day, light resisting darkness. Water, air, light: these images invite us to plunge suddenly into elements that meet only to disappear into the horizon. These immense images, bathed in a white light, with their rainbow sheen, are all photographed in the same way, with the same proportion of sky and sea, and at regular moments of the night. Before these calming variations of white, the gaze seems to lose itself in the brightness of the Nordic night. “One goes to the Lofoten Islands in order to disappear,’ says Marie Bovo. Strangely luminous and evanescent, these silent landscapes, seemingly empty, are transformed into spaces of contemplation and meditation. At the same time, the beauty of the light and their very peculiar chromatic softness lend her works a sort of timelessness. ‘I have spent hours and hours observing the landscape, looking for nuances. I basically don’t know if I have spent ten days or one eternal day,’ she adds. Her poetic experience of this polar world, of these border regions, have given her a chance to escape from time. Slowly and surely, with her view camera she examines the landscape in order to bring forth its density. The landscape is no longer looked at, it is plumbed. These images give the impression not only of having been taken in the midst of duration, but of continuing to unfold their present before our eyes. In this spectacle of a wilderness of unreal beauty, in this impression one has of spatial and temporal infinity, Marie Bovo seems to identify the only possible eternity.
Mouna Mekouar