The Radiance project is concerned with the recording of colour in photography, based on the assumption that the photographer has only limited control over the colours he records and renders. For Mustapha Azeroual, the aim is to approach this photographic process as a phenomenon, as an autonomous and moving element in which the viewer’s point of view, in the spatial and sensitive sense of the term, plays a predominant role. Each of the works that Radiance composes thus aims to create an archive of light, and by extension of colour. Taking the form of inventories on lenticular media, these studies of light are carried out in a unit of place: Radiance#2 (2013) was created in France, Radiance#5 (2016) in Iceland, Radiance#6 (2019) in Morocco and Radiance#7 (2020) in Beijing, where the artist recently had his first solo exhibition in Asia. The combination of the four works highlights the singularity of the luminous phenomena and the contrasts in perception between these geographical zones, from the Far North to Africa, from Europe to Asia.
At sunrise or sunset, two key moments of the day in relation to the chromatic variations of the light, Mustapha Azeroual photographs the same landscape. He takes several shots on the same film plane; negatives that he then gathers digitally. The making of the images, through this double superimposition, transforms the landscape into an abstract form, and reduces it to a horizon line.At the end of this synthesis, the artist retains four or five images which he transfers onto a single medium, the lenticular, a technical process which, combined with movement, allows for a sequential reading. Each movement of the spectator then replays the repetitive cycle of natural light, from sunrise to sunset. In a privileged relationship with the work, two people side by side can never perceive the same nuances.
In this way, the work Radiance goes beyond the notion of the photographic moment, associated with the single image, to approach the sequence in the moving images. An experience of time, which Mustapha Azeroual combines with the experience of light as a synthesis of colors. Like these acme points of light at dawn and dusk, Radiance joins the sensation, an image- experience stretched to infinity.