"These balloon invasions are metaphors. Their purpose is to change our perspective on things that we encounter every day without paying attention."
- Charles Pétillon
Charles Pétillon excels in what we might call the art of visual haiku. With the short Japanese poems, his creations share the same inclination toward capturing a moment, toward the concise evocation of the elusive nature of the world, and the same deceptive simplicity.
His interventions in places devoid of human presence or in the great outdoors, of which his photographs constitute the record, are akin to poetic, enigmatic and neatly articulated statements. They seek to bring to consciousness incongruities, odd circumstances, paradoxes of our time. They make us aware of situations that we might tend to forget or to ignore. "These balloon invasions," says the artist, "are metaphors. Their purpose is to change our perspective on things that we encounter every day without paying attention."
One could say that the intention of the artist is to highlight the imprint of Man on his environment, the complex relationships between nature and society. To highlight, and not to decipher nor to give away. The artist's always perfectly refined creations give their subject an aura where they seem stripped down to their essence and as if enclosed in the realm of intuitive perception. A subtle approach that requires a lot of preliminary work on each project.
Nothing is left to chance with Charles Pétillon. The light, the staging, the composition of his photographs, everything is fully planned out and controlled. As for his monumental installations, they are often interactive and equipped with a device to change the lighting, generate sounds or set the white balloons in motion depending on the movement of the visitors.
These large mobile works are reminiscent of the artist's photographic work, which also evokes this idea of motion, of time elapsed, of a before and an after materialized by the flowing movement of the balloons. Consciously or not, in front of these photographs we anticipate the next moment. We picture in our mind the white spheres that continue to spill out. Then perhaps the best way to characterize the work of Charles Pétillon is to speak of a world in suspension where things are not yet definite but purposely maintained as potentialities. A world in suspension that reaches out beyond the works themselves and extends over time, and in the mind of the viewer.
Born in 1973, Charles Pétillon is an artist known for his photographs and his large-scale in situ installations. His work is regularly shown in galleries around the world, as well as in museums such as the Maison de la Photographie in Lille, France. Often solicited for projects in the public space, his large-scale in situ works include a monumental installation made up of more than 100,000 balloons at the Covent Garden in London, in 2015, and one in Paris-Charles de Gaulles airport in 2020.