Bunkers

Monotypes on paper

Made from minimal black forms printed on paper, the series Bunkers originates in the abandoned military structures along the Atlantic coast, and more particularly in Paul Virilio’s reflections in Bunker Archaeology.

These geometric masses, reduced to a few lines or dark planes, evoke the concrete fortifications left behind by German forces after the Second World War: structures stranded facing the sea, gradually overtaken by erosion, sand and time. For Virilio, the bunker emerges less as a military object than as a mental and political form—an architecture of fear, waiting and control, but also a strange, unintended sculpture born of historical catastrophe.

The monotypes in Bunkers extend this ambiguity. Their forms seem at once massive and fragile, archaic and abstract, recognisable before almost dissolving in the economy of the gesture. Reduced to elementary marks, they hover between landscape, architecture and sign.

The monotype process plays an essential role here. Each image retains something unstable, partially erased or accidental. The ink reveals uneven densities, areas of disappearance and uncertain edges. The forms seem to emerge from an incomplete memory rather than from descriptive representation.

This economy of means also enters into dialogue with certain forms of American minimalist sculpture, particularly the work of Richard Serra. These images share an attentiveness to the physical tension of forms reduced to their elemental presence.

As is often the case in my work, the aim is to bring a presence into view rather than to document a subject. These bunkers become less identifiable military structures than mental figures: silent silhouettes set within the Western landscape, remnants of a modernity marked by war, surveillance and collapse.

Through their pared-down frontality, the images also question what remains of the architectures of power once they have lost their original purpose. Between ruin, sculpture and abstraction, Bunkers explores a space where history, memory and perception continue to resonate within forms stripped to their barest presence.