Franck Miltgen

What shapes my work is its grounding in a direct relationship with my immediate environment. This proximity is precious to me at a time when our sensitivity fades in the face of growing abstraction. The environment, once tangible and embodied, slips into the unfathomable, leaving our perceptions fragmented, mediated by digital and cultural systems.

Immersing my work in the real world means reestablishing a direct contact with places, with the very material of what surrounds us. The image thus captured is a surface marked by this reality, which fixes our present as a historic moment: the moment when the ecological crisis reflects our detachment from the environment, accelerated by the digital revolution. Once collected, the work consists of imbuing this trace with a visual resonance, an opening that reveals what had previously remained obscured.

The ornament is at the heart of my visual research. It embodies the values of an era, the permanence of a collective imagination, and the environments it has shaped over time. The forms are drawn from a repertoire of historical and natural sources: inscriptions, graffiti, rockeries, stacks, spirals, arabesques, corals, crystals, rock formations, exotic flowers, and defensive architectures. These often ambiguous elements form a grotesque language where creation and destruction, giving and appropriation, transmission and rupture coexist.

Through this visual substrate, the lightness and immediacy of the ornament meet the spiritual and conceptual depth of abstract art, thus producing a landscape of the Anthropocene, where an informal amalgam of nature and culture allows us to see the time that separates the environment from the immediacy of contemporary culture. (FM)