Spirituelles Odyssées” exhibition for the opening of the Atelier de La Grande Vitrine in Arles on Sept. 30. 2025
Éric Petr maintains a dynamic relationship with light
The subtlety of his shots generates a kind of dramatic intensity that is both intangible and elusive, bringing to the image an aura of mystery and strangeness — like a spiritual illumination emerging from the night of time.
He treats apparition as an inner space, challenging the viewer to make the necessary effort to grasp it.
The immaterial sensation of his images carries us into an infinite space without spatial or temporal reference points, which, like his apparitions, produce a perceptual experience that overwhelms us.
He materialises a distortion of time that traverses space — a radiance emanating outward, and a sensation of transcendence.
His experiments question the conditioning of the gaze toward form, as well as its approach to reality and abstraction alike.
Ana Sartori
Text presented for the exhibition “Spiritual Odysseys” at the opening of L’Atelier de La Grande Vitrine in Arles, on 30 September 2025.
A cultural and creative venue dedicated to ART, with multidisciplinary programming, a space for exchange and transmission.
On the occasion of this event, I will have the pleasure of presenting, with the support of the Atelier de La Grande Vitrine, the monograph À Fleur de Lumière, in a limited edition. An invitation to subscribe in advance to the very first copies of this work and to take part in laying the foundations of this edition.
To mark the occasion, I’m delighted to present a limited-edition monograph entitled À Fleur de Lumière. An invitation to subscribe, in advance, to the first copies of this book and to participate in the foundations of this edition.
When it’s exhibited, edited or published, it’s the result of a lot of hard work, a lot of passion and a real human, temporal and financial investment.
If photography exists, it’s also thanks to those who support it: amateurs, enthusiasts, collectors, professionals, but also the photographers and artists themselves who defend it on a daily basis.
However, to ensure that all these beautiful images discovered free of charge on social networks can continue to exist, it’s essential to support photographers in your own way. Buying a postcard, a book, a small limited-edition photo or a work of art of your own means contributing to the survival of art photography in a world where we’re getting used to “seeing without paying”.
There’s no such thing as a small contribution: even 5 euros invested in a participatory edition to encourage an artist is already a strong, committed gesture.
I sincerely thank you, who bought or invested 5 euros in my book SPIRITUELLES ODYSSÉES, published in February 2017 by Éditions Corridor Éléphant introduced by a magnificent seven-page text by Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret.
Your support has deeply helped and accompanied me on my journey as an emerging photographer. Thank you!!!
About the monograph SPIRITUELLES ODYSSÉES
Click on the image to enlarge and make the text easier to read
There are still a few copies available, before the final end of stock. Purchases can be made directly on my website, at the price of 42 €.
I’m pleased to offer a limited edition of emblematic photographs from my photographic narrative AMOUR, captured in the deep night of the Sainte-Baume during the Christmas procession.
These images, somewhere between abstraction and impressionism, bear witness to the collective energy of a moment of faith and silence, where walking bodies melt into the shadows and light of the forest.
You can acquire these photographs on my official gallery hosted by Artmajeur Gallery, an international platform dedicated to contemporary art.
Among these, I now offer this work, which is sold unframed, to give everyone the freedom to integrate it into their own space, according to their taste and sensibility. The print is made on high-quality art paper, in keeping with my artistic approach: respect for the material, the light and the moment captured.
Arc-en-Ciel 0xD81EFD44 (2022) | Print on Dibond (60x90cm) #5/5 ー [click to view image] ー
ー Dialogues on abstract art ー Hors les Murs ]RN structure[
This July 5, 2025 should have been the opening of ]RN structure[‘s Hors les Murs exhibition at the “Espaço Cultural Niterói”, in the sumptuous Palácio dos Correios overlooking the Bay of Rio de Janeiro.
Unfortunately, due to administrative complications beyond even the most sincere motivations, this project had to be cancelled, despite the enthusiasm, perseverance and tenacity deployed to bring such a wonderful and prestigious exhibition to fruition.
When the wheels of bureaucracy fail to vibrate in unison with the noble idea that art knows no borders, we reach what I would call a form of state sclerosis.
We should have been 51 New Realities visual artists exhibiting from July 5 to August 16, 2025 in Brazil, in front of Christ the Redeemer, around the inspiring theme: “Dialogues on abstract art”. But it was not to be.
However, I’m happy to share with you the two photographic works I had prepared for this exhibition, which also failed to cross borders.
They have now joined the Artmajeur gallery, and I invite you to discover them in detail by clicking on each image. Artmajeur gallery | Éric Petr
I wish you a wonderful summer or winter for those of you in the southern hemisphere.
Abstract Angel 0x3866AD02 (2024) | Print on Dibond (23x15cm) #1/5 ー [click to view image] ー
Espaço Cultural Correios Niterói
Located in the heart of Niterói, overlooking the bay of Rio de Janeiro, the Espace Culturel Correios is one of the most emblematic venues on the Brazilian art scene.
Dedicated to the promotion of contemporary creation, this space actively supports emerging and established artists, both local and international. It is part of a dynamic of openness, intercultural dialogue and the dissemination of visual arts in all their forms.
By hosting ambitious exhibitions, residencies and off-site projects, the Centro Cultural dos Correios affirms its commitment to a lively, accessible and forward-looking culture.
I’m not a photographer specializing in URBEX (Urban Exploration), but I can be drawn to certain sites where I feel an extraordinary energy, which in this case compels me to record it and visually extract its trace, memory or presence.
I’m going to present two photographic narratives, one of which was taken at the bottom of the island of Koh Chang in Thailand, and the other on Hashima, an island off Nagasaki in Japan.
Koh Chang, Elephant Island and its Ghost Boat
This is a site invested by a local billionaire to create a highly original hotel complex, but built on a site that is sacred to the Thais.
In Thailand, many places are considered sacred: ancient cemeteries, sites of worship… Yet some have been redeveloped for real estate projects, such as Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport. However, the most prestigious Buddhist monks and priests generally take care to purify these places before any construction takes place.
In a way, it’s a request for permission from the deities to avoid offense.
Of course, if you don’t believe this nonsense, I recommend you stop reading immediately, or you’ll be wasting your precious time.
But the site I’m talking about wasn’t purified by the monks. So it became cursed, and a spell was cast.
We went there, however, and although we prayed at the Buddha altar on site, my wife, who was the investigator of this unusual epic, had an accident the very next day, and was deprived of the use of both her arms from the start of our stay. Rest assured, it was only for 6 weeks.
But the story doesn’t end there. We were accompanied by a couple of friends, and they too were injured a few days later: one in the knee, the other in the back.
Many would say it’s just a coincidence. Personally, I don’t believe in chance or bad luck. Life is much more complex than that.
Whatever the case, this place is imbued with a very special vibration that everyone can feel. And even if you’re standing by the beach, under the coconut palms, a strange, almost indescribable energy grips you and makes you dizzy.
To read the rest of the story and see the photographs, click here ….
Gunkanjima: The Warship and the Ghost Island of Hashima
Hashima is an island near Nagasaki, more commonly known as Gunkanjima, because of the shape it evokes: that of a warship. “Gunkan” means “warship”, and “Shima” or “Jima” refers to an island.
The island was a mining site from the end of the 19th century until the 1970s.
As mining operations expanded, more and more workers settled on the island—first the miners themselves, then their families, and later various professionals essential to maintaining the site. By the 1950s, Hashima had become a densely populated city, reaching an astonishing 85,000 inhabitants per square kilometer!
Now abandoned for almost 50 years, exposed to the dreaded weather of the East China Sea and frequent, merciless typhoons, the island has allowed itself to be overrun by nature.
Recently classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the mining town is no longer accessible for security reasons, but visits are still possible in small groups in certain authorized parts of the island.
To read the rest of the story about Hashima Island and see the photographs, click here ….
About the G-Lake Art Gallery at the Guihu Museum of Art・桂湖美术馆
The Guihu Art Museum is located in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province. It is committed to exploring the connotation of local Fujian culture in depth, and to presenting various academic research and artistic practices in a variety of exhibition formats. In addition to the exhibition, the Guihu Art Museum will also organize various special lectures, salons, workshops and literary fashion activities, and is equipped with independent libraries, public classrooms and cafés.
The art museum has long supported Fujian’s new generation of artists and cooperated closely with local art lovers and cultural and rural groups. It has also regularly invited art groups, artists, curators, designers and writers from outside Fujian province and around the world to make resident creations in Fujian. At the same time, the art gallery will also actively promote cultural exchange across the Strait.
Images and architectural presentation of the Guihu Art Museum
VARIATIONS DE LUMIÈRE OPUS 5 Photographic triptych 2021 (33x150cm) Copy #2/3 (+1 EA)
This opus is a continuation of a reflection on the essence of light and its effect on the perception of Being in its immediate or cosmic environment.
Light fascinates me by the duality of its state, at once corpuscular and undulatory, but also for everything that makes it our perception of the world.
My ” Variations de Lumière “, arranged by opus, present images born of my observation of light, revealing the gap in perception between the photographed reality and the photographic record.
It’s a metaphor, but I’d say that the medium of photography is particularly well-suited to this study, because the photons that strike my negative, materialized by impact points on the emulsion layer of silver halide crystals, or on the low-pass filter of a sensor, describe the corpuscular nature of light during the shooting phase.
Similarly, this material, used as a material, underlines the wave-like nature of light, when these impacts on the negative become oscillations on the paper.
From this observation of photons recorded at a moment ” T ” in their infinite course through the cosmos, at a precise point in the universe, comes this writing of light.
Variations of Light opus 7 | Quantum entanglement (2024) detail [Click to enlarge image]
This work is the fruit of a reflection developed for a project of three exhibitions (2024〜2025) by UNESCO’s CNFAP [Conseil National Français des Arts Plastiques] as part of its “Dialogues” program, conducted in close collaboration with the CIAE [Center for research on art and the environment] of the UPV [Polytechnic University of Valencia] , two entities dedicated to the creation and dissemination of the visual arts.
” AVANT LA LETTRE ” is the title of the theme of this interdisciplinary exhibition, which expresses the concept of the project.
「 We want to take the lead on something that’s not yet defined. The point is to establish a relationship between what is written and its visual representation. In the same way that the avant-garde introduced words and typography as plastic elements in artistic work. With this intention, we will link this project with that one: “Artistic narrative as integral to a message. Connections between contemporary artists who use words”. The theme of this exhibition implies the use of words and letters in the work, as carriers of a conceptual or visual message, or as a plastic element in itself, in order to convey a message “avant la lettre”. 」 Curator
THE PROJECT
The artist will create two original works.
・Artwork n°1 : Visual or conceptual representation of a word that may or may not appear written in the work. This will be a free-format work, inspired by the proposed theme, ranging in size from 20 to 120 cm high and 20 to 70 cm wide. Depending on the exhibition space, this work will be exhibited alongside the second or placed separately. The two works should form a coherent whole.
・Work #2: Visual or conceptual representation of a letter. This second work is in the imposed A5 format in the horizontal direction, whose image could be smaller in size or occupy the entire surface of the paper. The support will always be flexible, as for the first work.
The first of the three exhibitions will take place at La Casa de la Cultura José Peris Aragó in the Alboraya district of Valencia (Spain) from November 15 to December 13, 2024
Variations of Light opus 7 | Quantum entanglement (2024) : Kakemono Washi Kozo 42 x 21 cm and Plexiglas A5 [Click to enlarge image]
This diptych is an interactive installation featuring a Japanese paper kakemono and printed transparent Plexiglas, which interact with each other and the viewer.
These two objects can be placed one on top of the other, next to each other, or separately in space.
Entanglement is the title of this opus 7, and in quantum mechanics means, and I quote: ” Entanglement, or quantum entanglement, is a phenomenon in which two particles form a linked system and exhibit quantum states dependent on each other, regardless of the distance separating them. “
Variations of Light opus 7 [Click to enlarge image]
Variations of Light opus 7 [Click to enlarge image]
The space between the two components of the work is the energy they emit between them, as if we had on one side the energy of the word, the signifier and the meaning, and on the other the energy of the letter, which in its uniqueness takes on another meaning that echoes that of the word.
In this installation, the letter “O” sits perfectly at the center of the word “HEART”, but also anywhere in the space. It’s the viewer who, by simply moving the Plexiglas, will feel the energy change as the two components move apart.
In this installation, polysemy adds an unexpected depth to the meaning of the signifier and, by analogy, also expresses the “CHORUS”, i.e. the architectural heart of a place of belief, where the ” BEING”, since the most ancient times, has come in search of that oneness with the cosmos.
This installation also shows that thought, before it expresses itself in letters and words, is also a form of light writing, a primary but not primitive form of writing.
THE BOOK AND THE BOX SET OF THE EXHIBITION
An artist’s book has been published, retracing the entire exhibition AVANT LA LETTRE. A separate box set gathers, in A5 format, all the visuals of the works on the LETTER, presented by each artist alongside their main work evoking the WORD.
「 Éric PETR, born in the 60s, worked in the 80s, and later, in the early 2000s, on the image set in motion with an artistic intention using a camera.
This technique was named several years later “Intentional Camera Movement”, taken up by the hashtags #icm or #icmphotography and is today widely taken up by many talented young photographers.
Following the dynamics of several photographers and visual artists who preceded him, such as Kōtarō Tanaka (1905-1995), Ernst Haas (1921-1986), and Alexey Titarenko (born in 1962) of his generation and a few other experimentalists, PETR in turn experimented with this artistic path mainly between 2003 and 2015. Unlike his peers, he made it the heart of his photographic work.
For about ten years, PETR has created a movement and a technique that allow him to serve his intention and his research work on light. This technique, which he calls [Insitu Kinetic Photography], is the basis of his work, and has allowed him to set up many works that he has experimented with, particularly in abstract photography or subjective abstraction photography.
PETR began his career as a professional photographer in 2013 after 20 years of photographic research. After having caught the attention of some contemporary art players, between 2011 and 2014 where he assembled a synthesis of his work on light on his Blog and Instagram, he began in 2016 to be revealed in some prestigious magazines, such as L’OEIL DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE, to be exhibited at the SALON DES RÉALITÉS NOUVELLES and to be published by Éditions CORRIDOR ÉLÉPHANT with his first monograph “SPIRITUELLES ODYSSÉES”. Since then, PETR has chained publications and exhibitions in Paris, and in the World. 」
“in situ kinetic photography” first principle of a manifesto
I started practicing photography in 1983, and for ten years I had this idea of developing a research and aesthetic based on light, and the impact that light can have on our mind, our thoughts, and our perception of the universe.
I resumed this work in 2003, after taking a break from photography between 1993 and 2003. Nevertheless, my reflection on the image nourished this period of inactivity, which subsequently proved very rich and constructive for my photographic work.
Ten years later, in 2003, after thinking long and hard about the image, its role and its power, I continued my photographic work on light, as plastic or matter, with a fresh eye.
“Bangkok 2oo4” and other works from the same period show a body of work that drew inspiration from this time of reflection, introspection and maturation.
In this new era of digital imaging, this style of photography was not yet precisely named, but a decade later it was, under the name ICM (Intentional Camera Movement).
In the 20th century, some photographers devoted part of their work to this technical aspect of motion photography, such as, to name but a few, Kōtarō Tanaka (1905-1995), Ernst Haas (1921-1986), and Alexey Titarenko (b. 1962), who worked specifically on moving crowds.
In the early 2000s, my work on the moving image, with the idea of painting with light on my film or sensor, is very contemporary in approach, and remains on the bangs.
My work, which is based on the principle of intentional movement, has now evolved to bring a broader field to the ICM, which I call “in situ kinetic photography”. “In situ kinetic photography” brings a wider field to the “intentional camera movement” and takes into account different axes and planes, in situ, for the same exposure that oscillates from a few seconds to a few minutes.
“In situ kinetic photography” is similar to the ultrasound of a place that is produced like a micro-film, but which is recorded on a single image. It is therefore neither multiple exposures nor post-processing work. Its photography is part of the field of abstraction, or subjective abstraction. Its writing is done with light and photons constitute its alphabet. Its language is cosmic, its style dreamlike and its aesthetic plastic. This photography is similar to painting in the sense that it is constructed on site by composing the elements that are added to the image.
The brush or pencil is the light ray that contains the matter and energy of electromagnetic waves, while the canvas or paper is the film or the camera sensor. Unlike the painter or the calligrapher, it is not the brush that moves, but the support, that is to say the camera. It is also, in this sense, that the intention of “in situ kinetic photography” is in no way that of “light painting”, even if we can observe certain common points.
For this photograph, composed in situ, elements very dispersed on the site are carefully chosen to compose a photographic painting. After an analysis of the times allowing the addition of the elements to be photographed, the photographer will have to determine precisely the speed of the shutter, the aperture of the focal length, and the sensitivity of the film, according to any filters added.
For “in situ kinetic photography”, the intention is no longer movement, as in “intentional camera movement”, but that of constructing an abstract image with a plastic density that will suggest the superposition of quantum states of a geographical point that light crosses during its infinite odyssey.
