Jean-Martin Barbut is a photographer, author, composer, he lives and works in Marseille. He questions the illusion of reality, the relationship of consciousness to time and space. His life journey and his readings have led him to observe a distortion between the sensitive experience of reality and its intelligible experience. Starting from the contemplation of Nature, which is for him a doorway to the essence of things, his approach is as much philosophical as it is aesthetic. He is deeply contemplative and it is by observing his memory of moments, by trying to discern the emotional side of facts, that he tries to find his way through the illusion of the experience of phenomena and the incomplete representations that result from it. His work is allegorical, he tries to evoke the little we know about the nature of things, or at least to lead us to question our certainties about the experience of the world. In this photographic series, he has used water as a metaphorical support for his subject because it has the particularity of presenting itself to us in different states, like the intimacy of matter in the laboratories of physicists. His work is deeply inspired by the reading of the analyses of reality by Schrödinger and the Copenhagen group, but also by the intuitions of the Presocratics such as Democritus or Protagoras, as well as the great mystics such as Augustine of Hippo, in particular his reflections on time. Jean-Martin Barbut always adapts his technique to the questioning he evokes in order to avoid entering into a system. He never asserts anything, he prefers to propose paths of reflection. David Brunel, Doctor of Aesthetic Philosophy, writer, photographer, says of his work on waves in his text "La Prose de Poséidon": [...] Fixed images. Yes. But, as never before, my eyes moved in front of me; inside. ...] "The cutting effect, the usefulness of the margin, the demonstration of framing, of the off-screen left in place, in space. Jean-Martin Barbut's waves join well with Alfred Stieglitz's clouds (his series Equivalents), they convert a wild nature, installed out of sense, indocile, autonomous, into a graphic language, a language of its own, a recognized language, that of the image. Cutting effects therefore - the holy grail of photography." […]
