Seeing May Not be Believing, But Believing Is Seeing

What happens when you take reality and multiply it, bend it, sculpt it, until a world that is simultaneously familiar and exhilaratingly new stretches before you?

Imagine an endless dreamscape that unfurls at your feet as you run; you are moving too quickly to see the details of what is around you, to imagine what lies ahead- but no matter, a city springs up wherever way you turn. It is impossible to consciously imagine such a highly-detailed world so instantaneously, and yet, it appears, seeming to build itself from the back catalogues of the fringes of your subconscious memory.

In an eerily reminiscent mix of Escher, Inception, and something else that just escapes definition, Jean Francois Rauzier’s highly surreal art evokes nothing less than a sense of awe.

Rauzier is best known for his hyperphotography. He arrives on a scene and shoots hundreds, sometimes upwards of a thousand images, gathering bits and pieces, angles and planes, flutes and cornices, sheen and grain. Windows, reflections, branches, ripples in the water. These are then stitched together and assembled into an environment so large and seamless it is difficult if not impossible to tell where one piece ends and another begins.

His galleries are worth taking the time to explore. Open images to fullsize; the viewer is interactive. Zoom in. And in. And in. Marvel. Pan over, repeat.

What you will find as you zoom in is that unlike a conventional photo, everything between the foreground and very distant background remains in sharp focus. Even when one thinks that the resolution has been maxed out- that there is no possible way to zoom in further without a mess of pixels- there is sharp detail. What appears to be a solid, if slightly mottled structure, turns out to be covered in windows and architectural details. Inside the windows are lamps. Furniture. Potted plants. And stretching out to the horizon, a veritable army of similarly mottled structures.

Rauzier’s work is an infinite labyrinth of visual treasures. One gets the sense of a meta-meta-meta-world, a recurring landscape in which the both the environment and what it contains might appear multiple times in various forms, but no one can quite put a finger on precisely what, when, and where, if at all. The closer one looks, the more there is to see.

It’s hard to not be fascinated.

It is only in an idealized world, one might think, that there could be such a richness of sensory opulence. But it’s not. It’s not. New details, interesting sights and things and facts are all there, are already there, all about you, waiting for you to notice them, for you to make the right connections.

What Rauzier does is merely put together permutations that have not yet occurred in this plane of existence.