Artist Bio
Lionel Fourneaux (b. 1954, Suresnes, France) is a French photographer and visual artist. After studying literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, he began exhibiting his work and, in 1979, received the Young Photographer Award at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, together with a grant from the Fondation Nationale de la Photographie in Lyon. Since the 1990s, his practice has shifted from documentary photography towards a more reflective exploration of the nature, meaning, and use of images. Working with photography, archives, found imagery, and photographic installations, he investigates memory, history, and the relationship between personal and collective experience through processes of transformation and reinterpretation. His work has been exhibited extensively in France and internationally, including at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie, Galerie Le Réverbère, and venues in Geneva, Marseille, Antwerp, and Arles. Alongside his artistic practice, Fourneaux has led numerous educational workshops on photography and has published several self-edited books exploring the relationship between photography and writing. He is a member of SAIF and the Hans Lucas creative studio and has been represented by Galerie Le Réverbère in Lyon since 1996. He lives and works between Cassis and Le Diamant, Martinique.
Statement
It is no coincidence that the Mediterranean Sea is called the Great Blue. Indeed, this colour dominates the space between sea and sky, unless its brilliance is dimmed by a wildfire or a wall of concrete. I have long been drawn to this colour—perhaps always, if I think of that oasis on the coast of the Massif des Maures where my parents met one summer in the 1950s. I came into the world nine months later. This small selection of images seeks to portray the coastline of my region around Marseille and its seaside activity, with particular emphasis on the blue note—the colour of silence, the silence of photographs.
