Two emerging artists, Leticia Pérez and Thomas Guillin, have been selected as this week's featured talents for their compelling exploration of space, place, and the individuals who inhabit them. While Pérez uses photography to search for her identity through intimate spaces, Guillin documents territories in transformation with remarkable creative freedom.
Leticia Pérez, an artist with an architectural background now based in a small village in northern Spain, brings a unique perspective to contemporary photography. For her, "inhabiting doesn't simply mean occupying a place, but building a deep relationship with it and with ourselves." She believes that our environment and the relationship we maintain with it participate in the construction of our being.
Connecting the intimate with the external world appears at the heart of Pérez's artistic practice. With her architectural training, she poetically explores space, body, and memory, uniting them through imagery. Photography, in her hands, becomes a weaving process, a meeting point between these elements. More significantly, it allows the visual artist to reveal "the stories and emotions carried by everyday gestures and objects," giving consciousness to both the inanimate and the mechanical.
These everyday objects, carrying narratives and memories, contribute to a relationship of transmission and even filiation, as the photographer observes. In this sense, can't they be considered components of our person? This is what the young woman proposes with her series "Pórtico," in which she revisits the archives and memory of the family home. Through this project, the artist attempts to "reconstruct herself through physical and metaphorical spaces by exploring her most intimate and vulnerable self in order to learn to truly inhabit herself."
Thus, in Leticia Pérez's work, individuality becomes a house, a landscape of light, arcades, and reminiscences. Her photographs blend architectural plans with superimposed images of gestures and flowers, family archive photos of house construction, and black-and-white images that resemble landscapes or hollows in rock formations.
Thomas Guillin, currently working as a market gardener in Ariège, brings a different but equally compelling approach to photography. "Witnessing our era with an accuracy that only the eye can capture" is the strength of photography according to Guillin. However, this testimony takes various forms in his work, with his series oscillating between documentary and fiction.
His studies in literature and cinema, conducted between 2007 and 2012, undoubtedly influence his approach. As a logical continuation of this journey, he then turned to the photographic medium. "The still image allowed me to condense in a single frame the narrative complexity I was looking for," he explains. Today, while working as a market gardener, he continues his practice through occasional commissions and personal projects.
Through his personal work, Guillin addresses current social and environmental issues and expresses "the tensions between tradition and modernity, between nature and artificialization." More precisely, the artist seeks to transcribe landscape and urban upheavals. But this reportage-like approach is mixed with an approach celebrating the imagination.
"Depending on my projects, the latitude between real anchoring and fictional expression is very variable," explains Thomas Guillin. The greater this gap becomes, the more universal the concerned work becomes. This is the case with "Conquest," a series exploring the extension of metropolises and the consequences of this incessant development on peri-urban areas.
While the shots were taken in the periphery of Toulouse, the images show no sign of it. Nourished by science fiction imagery, they are almost totally decontextualized and present "spaces that seem to have existed only in a distant past or future." The series includes golden-tinted photographs of rocky ground, misty rock landscapes, buildings under construction, a man standing in the middle of a road in the evening looking toward the sky, a solar eclipse in a deep blue sky, and a handprint on a blue and pink background.
Currently building a corpus of images organizing ten years of photography, Thomas Guillin is developing a book where "each chapter contributes to a global reflection on our contemporary relationship to territory." His work demonstrates how photography can bridge the gap between documentary reality and fictional imagination, creating universal narratives that speak to broader human experiences with space and place.
