2012, from Autobiography, in my iPad application Horvatland
After my digital photo-montages of the mid-‘90s, such as Bestiary, Mythologies and Metamorphoses, I gave up these experiments, because I felt that they were leading to a dead end: the computer allowed too much control, with the result that virtual reality become so much more predictable – and hence less exciting – than real life. Still, I missed the fun that these experiments had provided me, and often told myself that some time in the future I would try again, in the hope of producing images which might be just as unrepeatable as a good photograph – because they would arise from a set of circumstances and a frame of mind that couldn’t recur. In 2011, my friend Hélène Busnel (the actress and dancer who had modeled for Metamorphoses) was invited to participate in a festival whose idea was to present work produced in collaboration, by artists of different branches. It seemed an opportunity for a new attempt. Without knowing exactly what we were going to do, I suggested a trip to the marble quarries of Carrara and the sculpture workshops in nearby Pietrasanta, because we were both interested in sculpture and both longing to visit these places. What I had in mind were images that could be mistaken for real photos, but which in fact were in a no man’s land between reality and fiction, discovery and fantasy, reporting and cheating, objet-trouvé and trompe-l'oeil (two French terms for which I don’t know an English equivalent).
