Geneviève Michon is an ethnobotanist and photographer.
His professional life and his artistic interest revolve around the Tree, and in particular the “Peasant Tree”, the one that has accompanied the rural cultures of the world since the dawn of time, the one who forged his personality in contact with the 'Man. Proposal that can be reversed (and if it was the personality of Men which was gradually refined in contact with the Trees?) And which gives work another dimension: through its images, right? also, and above all, cultures mixed between Man and Tree which the artist wants to account for? Isn't it, ultimately, a certain type of relationship with Nature and other forms of the Living that we are talking about?
It is therefore a question of presenting Trees made up of both their own history, and of the bonds woven with several dozen generations of men. Trees worked by Men, like reflections of Men crossed by these Trees.
To experience the Tree in the diversity of its forms and of the stories that constitute it gradually creates an initiatory journey as much as a form of contemplation of what remains eternally inaccessible to us: a form of life totally foreign to the ours, but which is nevertheless closely intertwined with it, envelops us and allows us to live. Plant forms in which our own history is written.
To stay as close as possible to what these trees convey to her, Geneviève Michon superimposes the snapshots taken from life, playing between transparency and opacity, often mixing "brushstrokes" and drawings borrowed from her friend Philippe Deltour, plastic artist. , with whom she has worked for over three years now.
These images, often reworked for a long time, gradually constitute a "forest by accumulation", in which the artist's work ends up weaving into the trunks and branches all the human stories that have now passed through them, and often , marked. A forest that is not a replication of the Same, but a deployment of total singularities, of slow, motionless dances, patiently constructed over the centuries.
And behind this forest of Trees, but without any pictorial anthropomorphism, a forest of human silhouettes, faces and gestures, still present around these Trees: a humanity inscribed in filigree.
