Discover the contemporary work of André Mertz

Advertising photographer since 1978, I began my artistic work after meeting Lucien Clergue. The computer tool allowed me to break reality and reconstruct another reality

Painting, photographing the bodies gushing from women in all their states to make desire last is what I try to achieve. I make last and fix what would otherwise have no immediate existence. My erotic heroines never cease to set the traps fomented by the creator. I often seize them in the momentum or the secret. To a language of the body responds mine. My approach tries to infuse matter and movement into bodies. A double corporality emerges. It combines the momentum of sex and that of artistic vision.  Bodies are exalted in the prolongation of this embrace. Organic and mental interpenetration. Its perception, its sensation. (interpretation of a text by JP Gavard-Perret

My aim is not so much the representation of a naked female body, nor the realistic vision of an aquatic landscape, but the possibility offered by digital work to try to represent my personal universe of dreams. Taking the viewer from reality to dreams, that's what best sums up my work!
Trying to share the moment when time seems to stop before the beauty of the woman's body playing with the reflections of the water, with the wind or with light, or trying to capture the patterns of water, probably the bearer of memory, that's what motivates me. Not to be satisfied with reality, to break the mirror, to discover the photo hidden behind the photo, not to be satisfied with the reality of a flesh laid bare, but on the contrary to discover another reality, that's my ambition.
"Photographer and poet, that's our only ambition..." (L. Clergue)
I also claim (modestly!) this expression, and if digital technology allows me to transgress the inevitable reality, I find there a freedom that was probably, until now, almost exclusively reserved for painters. What a joy to force color to the point of resembling that of the emotion felt when taking the picture. What power to modify the appearance of the flesh to leave room only for an almost unreal "carnal matter".
Christian Gattinoni, professor at The National School of Photography in Arles recently wrote:
"An impure practice, Photography teams up with the visual arts as well as with live performance to document our individual and collective legends".
Technique for technique's sake is a dead end, if it serves to share my dreams, I use it without hesitation or false modesty.