“I’ve never felt like a photographer, I just collect things in the street, or from the press, simply waste and fragmented images.”

Looking at Pierre-Olivier Arnaud’s work means confronting a grey mass of images, whose subject is sometimes hard to make out. His piece Play Still is an open corpus of images, the four photographs in the exhibition being taken from it. They are “as much objects or facts, which have been seen and photographed, as they are details of images”. While this collection may at first sight seem disparate, the images resonate with each other through certain recurrent themes, such as the history of monochromes, modernist architecture and the photography of the 1920s and 1930s. Pierre-Olivier Arnaud’s work on images – blow-ups, desaturation, a play of scales and supports – raises doubts about the very status of the images in question. “They then look like remains, fragments and possible echoes”.

Pierre-Olivier Arnaud was born in 1972 in Lyon. He is a graduate of the Ecole régionale des Beaux-Arts, Saint-Etienne.