Vincent Fournier is a French artist and photographer exploring significant utopian and futuristic stories.
His pictures play with oppositions between documentary and fiction, past and future, science and magic, intimacy and universality, logic and the absurd. Having grown up with the idea of "the end of history" and living in the eternal present, he uses images to question our past and future utopias. What are our expectations for the future, and has the future already happened?
His works can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) in New York, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the LVMH Contemporary Art collection, the Dragonfly Collection (Domaine des Etangs / Primate), Massignac, or in the Oscorp Art Collection in the movie "Spider-Man II" for Columbia Pictures, among others.
After being awarded a diploma in both sociology and visual arts, he studies at the National School of Photography in Arles and obtains his diploma in 1997. After several years as a creative director and photographer in the advertising and movie industry, he leaves for a great trip He was writing a book about the world during the year 2004. His realizes then his first series, Tour Operator , which is going to put the foundations of his photographic style: contrasts of scale, sharp architectural composition, precision of the aestheticism, mastery of natural light, interest in paradoxical situations embodying tension and irony ...
Switching from a documentary style to more and more staged images, he explores futuristic fiction and discovers in our present, or in the past, glimpses of the future. His work is one of the most representative utopias from the 20th and 21st centuries: the great adventure of space exploration, the futuristic architectures, artificial intelligence ... In these imaginary archives, one's memory works both ways - White Queen in Alice in Wonderland explains - in the past, but also in the future. A world where you can remember things before they happen.
Space Project is a founding project, a genuine world tour of the most emblematic space research centers. Artificial intelligence and robotics will become his other playground with the Man Machine series. His most recent work Post Natural History raises the question of the possible mutations of living organisms by technology and in particular biological engineering.
If the photography remains his medium of preference, 3D printing, video or installations can sometimes come to accompany some of his projects. His pictures are playing with multiple oppositions: documentary / fiction, past / future, science / magic, intimacy / universality, logic / absurd ... Having grown up with "the end of History" and living in the eternal present, he questions with his images our past and future utopias ... What are our expectations for the future?