What first strikes us in Julien Gobled’s images is their mystery. What exactly are we looking at? Why are these images so beautiful, so present? How do they appeal so powerfully to our memory? How can they feel so strong while remaining so fragile?

At the origin are images with a dated aesthetic, gathered from the web, fragments of a shared visual memory. These images then become a field of research, a “material for construction.” As if seeking to extract from them some essential substance, Julien Gobled manipulates them endlessly. Freeing himself from the narrowness of thought governed by reason, he filters, erases and recomposes them, without control or restraint, guided only by a relentless pursuit of pictorial emotion.

The result is a body of work that is as dissonant as it is coherent. Perhaps it is the irrational — the common driving force at the source of all these images — that binds them together and touches us so deeply.

Sylvia Tournerie