“ What we look for and respect in art is not an original expression, nor the interest of an audience, but the process of figuration itself, when it aims to produce an image that is quite simply correct; correctness which in itself has a formative value in the experience of the world."
Jeff Wall is a contemporary Canadian artist known worldwide for his photographs, notably presented in lightboxes. His images represent moments that seem to have been captured on the spot, at the very heart of everyday life. Wall builds all of his work around the subjective force of images, or more exactly their inability to objectively render a reality. His work takes the opposite path to the documentary approach: rather than wanting to give a very real scene an extraordinary character, he arranges his images "down to the millimeter" in order to make them banal and ultra-realistic. Whether they are street scenes or interiors, photographs of children or adults captured in their daily actions, whether they show marginalized people or socially integrated people, urban or rural landscapes, all are in the spotlight. both familiar and unusual, their banality simultaneously giving off a false, unreal, abnormal atmosphere. Images of reality devoid of any realism, contemporary images that continually reconnect with the past, a veritable theater of human passions, Wall's works denounce reality in so far as it is nothing more than the fiction of itself.