Edouard Decam walks tirelessly in the immensity of mountain landscapes, the Pyrenees in particular, and records the traces of man through dams, these captivating, brutalist constructions that engulf us.
Trained as an architect and a passionate mountaineer, E. Decam maintains an almost romantic relationship with nature and delivers us visions of the mountains with large formats and serigraphs of lakes for his Landscape Scale ensemble presented here, and in his work in general. Whether with other series such as Cavallers , under or his film Volva, landscape and the environment are the heroes of his work. He patiently dissects them to reveal their multiple layers.
By putting himself in extreme conditions, E. Decam starts a quest for images whose final results are not totally random. High mountains, cold, hostility, rocky outcrops form the universe in which he evolves. His walks have an element of chance, but there is a rigour and accuracy in the final processing of the photograph, always very well constructed and of great precision. These images are there to bear witness to the link between man and nature. In spite of a sometimes post-apocalyptic dimension, this one seems to survive in the midst of its degradation.
Edouard Decam was able to discover, during his journeys, other places such as tunnels, industrial infrastructures, and preserve them with the help of his equipment. In his approach, where slowness and time are important elements to slip little by little into the observed space, the choice to work with a camera is not insignificant. Through it, an economy of the image is imposed, as opposed to the over-consumption of digital. This technical choice is obviously linked to the subject of nature. A form of philosophy can be discerned in it, as can the artist’s approach as a whole. Edouard Decam seeks this solitude of the confines of the landscape, of the abyss, and makes both his steps and his photographs a rigorist way of life.
There is in E. Decam’s work a deep interest in linking his practice to science and in his research on hydraulic, spatial, or glacial systems, the artist questions our origins and our passage.