It must first be mentioned that Anne-Laure H-Blanc’s eye captures, and collects by observing her surroundings to retain only the fleeing, the tiny, and the almost nothing. Indeed, it is within this interstice, more than anywhere else, that her fragility is told. The image in its immediacy fits on the sensitive surface of the retina. The image, presence becomes absence. It composes the strata of memory to constitute the mold of what one day will become incarnated. And so begins the work of remembering.
Despite the medium used, Anne-Laure H-Blanc’s work is to be considered a snapshot, in a photographic sense: a superposition of revealed moments that are constituted from snapshots of memory and reality. It launches a process which involves tracing: to feeling of what has been and surfaces what is no longer. Imprints, features, lines and graphs materialize to become motives, which repeat, interlock, make links and sense by feeding off of the previous ones. Each intervention resonates, echoes and layers at the same time: an intimate archive and revelation all at once, of what was.
In the act of covering the surface, whatever it might be, there is a will to unveil. Every gesture performed follows a ritual: rub, wipe, scrape, scarify, scratch, print, drop, cover, weave, accumulate, mix, start again. The aim is to make the trace exist / to find the trace, and perhaps find substance. It involves the act of making and remaking in order to better understand. In each new image, the aura of the previous and the sprout of the next are superimposed. They are not, to use Maldiney’s words, images of memory but of a calling, which free us from familiar evidence of the well-known and which carry us far into the unknown of another Open. They establish a point of view on the world. They are intimately linked to life.