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SELECTED WORKS

HOPE

An original art installation from Cyril Delettre

  

Inspired by his series HOPE (on going since 2022), art photographer Cyril Delettre settles an original installation for you to experiment physically entering the art piece.

Cyril Delettre's installation symbolises human ability to transform darkness into colors : you enter the Black and White portrait to go through the bright hidden hopes and reach the colorful character. On the path, entering somebody else’s spririt, Cyril Delettre invites you to go through her HOPE and rediscover yours.

HOPE series is a momentum.
“I would like to challenge the new generation, the 20’s who face the future.

Who are you and who will you be ?
You read everywhere “There is no more future !”

My statement: 

Nothing is written. Never underestimate who you are and what you can do to change the world ! 
I refuse to give up. You new generation have all right and necessity to believe that there is still option for a bright future.
Embrace the world with enthusiasm and change it, you have this power.
Otherwise there is no more light to hope.


The exhibition spreads positive energy to all of us as a community.

Artistic choice:
I wanted to create a portrait in motion, similar as a ballet.
It represents the multiple emotions of the 20 years old generation facing the possibilities of  their/our futures.
Each of their choice is world impacting, a challenge for the model but also for all of us as a community.
The dark portraits reflect the uncertainty of their times but each one backs onto a bright colour and a positive thought.
The air goes through as it waves the Tibetan prayers book : the wind unveils and spread the positive attitude.”

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.

How to see the light? Walk the dog

In collaboration with Marie-Florence Gros

DOG walks with Master.

Their everyday walks give him many occasions to capture the life of the city.

With iPhone, Master shoots, talks, while DOG thinks.

DOG tries to attract his attention, wonders about iPhone who talks to Master, and concludes that Phone (Fung) is in fact the master of his master.

DOG decides to address Fung.

Read more

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©Marie-Florence Gros

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Cyril Delettre is a French artist specialising in photography and videography. His work is a balance between documentary and art.

Hong Kong has inspired him the following series: How To See The Light…Walk the dog, Eclosions HK, After Midnight, Afternoon, Rythmes, Walk Don’t Walk,Wild City and Hope.

In 2018, Delettre documented people living in the Dump Site of Cebu, Philippines, with the help of the NGO Children of the Mekong.

In 2014, Cyril Delettre and Marie-Florence Gros moved to Hong Kong, where they are based now, and founded La Galerie Paris 1839, an art gallery dedicated to photography.

His other photography series include Vibrations, Om, NYC, Eclosions, Impressions, Travelling, and Square Noir.

The series Eclosions was created for a monumental artwork to cover the façade of Gare d’Austerlitz (Station of Austerlitz), during the station’s redevelopment works. The artwork measured 60 metres long and 7 metres tall, and was in place from 2012 to 2015.

In 2012, he directed a short film Execution, based on an original screenplay by Marie-Florence Gros. Producing a special film with a great team, he addressed the subject of the death penalty in a tone of caustic irony.

He released Objectifs de Campagne, a documentary about photojournalists who followed the 2007 electoral campaign. Throughout these reportages, he showed the backstage of electoral campaigns as well as the hard work of photojournalists.

Delettre joined the press agency Imapress in 1989 and then REA in 2002. As a press photographer, he worked closely with multiple French politicians. He has covered a myriad of societal subjects such as illegal immigrants, the closing of the migrants' centre in Sangatte, religious communities and influential women in France. His pictures were featured in important French magazines, including Paris Match, L'Express, VSD, Les Cahiers du Cinéma, Le Nouvel Observateur, and Le Figaro.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

- Hope, The Nguyen Art Foundation, Ho Chi Ming City. 2024

- Hope, Affordable Art Fair Hong Kong, 2023.

- Hope, Art Central, 2022, La Galerie Paris 1839, 2023

- The Flag Project, group show at the Rockefeller Center New York, 2021

- Dialogue in collaboration with Almond CHU, La Galerie Paris 1839, Le French May associated program, Hong Kong, 2018

- Eclosions Restaurant Ce La Vi, Hong Kong, 2018

- Eclosions, Rythmes & After Midnight solo show at Art Central Hong Kong Fair, 2018

- Eclosions La Galerie Paris 1839, Le French May associated program, Hong Kong 2017

- Art Car Eclosions with the support of th HKAGA at The Four Seasons Hong Kong, 2017

- After Midnight associated program of ”Lumières HK”, Hong Kong 2017

- La France vue du train Gare de Massy TGV, Massy, since 2013

- Eclosions Gare d’Austerlitz, Paris, 2012 - 2015

- Dans le ventre des femmes, «59» rue de Rivoli, Paris, 2012

- Paris, New-York, Grandes Ligne Gare de l’EST, Paris, 2011

- Les Français vus du train, Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris, 2010

- NYC Galerie REA, Paris, 2008

- Om Viaduc des Arts, Paris, 2008

- Vibrations Galerie REA Pars, Brugge Art Gallery , Club de «L’étoile», 2006​​

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