In his clever photographs of landscapes, Paris based photographer Guillaume Amat visually explores the meaning of continuity. His recent and ongoing series titled “Open Fields” features images of empty scenes occupied by a fixed, centered mirror to give a window into all that is missing or, perhaps, all that is present. Amat’s images are striking and profound, sincere in their depictions of reality yet simultaneously contrived. One gets a sense of seeing more deeply into the moment than a typical photograph can provide.
Similar to Olafur Eliasson’s “Inside City Outside” (2010), which follows a mirror-mounted truck through Berlin, bringing reality and its reflection into a single frame, Amat’s work manipulates dimensions in grasp our reality more deeply. Using mirrors, he adds another level to landscapes by matching the horizon-line with the reflected image, producing a sense of continuity. The effect is poetic, allowing two moments to exist within one another.
The images counter-balance one another, creating a strangely dream-like yet unified quality; doorways appear in cliffs, iron pipes complete tree trunks, and industrial silhouettes hover over the open ocean. Amat gives a window into another, equally extant, reality in order to create something composite yet whole.
