HORVATLAND - THE THIRD MILLENIUM - PROJECTS - LA VÉRONIQUEGO TO HOME

2010, from Autobiography, in my iPad application Horvatland

For a little more than a year, I rarely carried that camera further than fifty metres from La Véronique. But I used it every day, with a kind of thirst to absorb and to record what was around me, which kept reappearing as I kept appeasing it. This is why I gave this series the name of the house, which is also the name of the woman who shares it with me. You might say that all I show are faces with their eyes half closed, pots of butter and marmalade on a breakfast table, budding oak branches, poppies, spider webs, tree barks, over-ripe figs, kids in a swimming pool and rubbish bags. But then you would be ignoring my delight as I recognised, through the HP (for “high precision”) viewfinder of the Nikon, the various ways in which the light was reflected (or absorbed) by the different surfaces. And the continuous changes of contrast and colour, not only with the hours of the day, the vagaries of the weather, the revolving of the seasons, but also with the onset of a breeze in the foliage, the arrival of a person or an animal in the surroundings, or just the presence of my own body, blocking or reflecting the sunlight: in other words, with the passing of time. The time of the living beings and the objects I was watching, but also (and even more) that of my attention to them and of the associations of ideas that they continually brought to my mind. My subject, ultimately, was not so much the reality around me, as my own perception of that reality. Just as it had already been in Daily Report, only with a more deliberate awareness of what I call the density of some moments, and of their irrevocability. This was particularly true of early mornings, when the sun was out: because of the transparency of the air, obviously, while it was still charged with the night’s moisture – but even more because of my own opening up, in those first hours of wakefulness, like a blank page waiting for words to be written on it.