Cyril Delettre
SELECTED WORKS
Walk Don’t Walk
I caught people lost in their thoughts at the crosswalk.
Stripped of any representation of themselves, they simply wait. I observe them as if they were on stage, each one carrying a thousand stories.
Time is suspended, it is an irreducible wait.
They are almost motionless. Between them and my lens, the flow of trams and buses creates a veil.
I try to contrast the speed of the city to the suspended time of the individuals, stopped in their tracks for this short moment.
For me, this is a symbolic image of Hong Kong, where the times overlap.
– Cyril Delettre
Wild City
My photographic walks in Hong Kong have led me to play with the streets. I have invited the ink paintings of Grand So, a street artist on Hollywood Road whom I meet daily, into my photographs. I wanted to animate the walls captured in my photographs with his animals on recycled paper, mixing contemporary Western architecture with traditional Chinese animals, concrete with paper, urban pollution with recycled materials, my gaze in motion with his timeless work.
It is a game on the mixing of times, places, and cultures; it is an image of the richness of the encounter.
– Cyril Delettre
All artworks in Wild City are unique pieces.
Eclosions
In the series of Eclosions, Hong Kong based French photographer Cyril Delettre expresses his feelings about this energetic metropolitan city through his lens. Exploring the mutation and metamorphosis in photography, Cyril Delettre transforms his photographs of Hong Kong street scenes into kaleidoscopic disc-like images using multi-exposure photography technique. From a picture of a building or landscape, Delettre creates a new meaning of “supernovas”. A new world appears with allusion of the original one. The new perspective he explores shows Hong Kong as he sees it: vibrant, unexpected and beautiful.
After Midnight
Cyril Delettre participates to the development of conceptual photography when pursuing the works of Stephen Shore and Lewis Baltz. Delettre’s photo series documents the side effects of modern civilization, focusing on places that lie outside the bounds of canonical reception: urban wastelands, abandoned industrial sites and warehouses. His photographs uncover the correspondences between spatial forms that occur in the everyday world and the advanced forms found in art. Delettre’s strategies imply a reflexive knowledge of the history of photography in that they deploy the photographer as a teacher of seeing and makes things visible through reductive gestures.
In his works, Delettre managed to extend the notion of documentary photography in a minimalist-style aesthetic. Delettre’s minimalist and reduced image compositions explore the photographic style as a process, and refer not only to the art of photographers like Lee Friedlander or Lewis Baltz.
Convergences are to be found in his formal and aesthetic compositional patterns as well as in the content he fixates on, which Delettre subjects to a highly critical analysis, without losing sight of the essentials. Delettre chooses to work after midnight when the city is abandoned and the electric lights redesign the perspective and new forms appear.