Julian Charrière’s art is situated at the intersection of performance, sculpture, and photography, and draws inspiration from expeditions to some of the planet’s most forbidding terrain. Through engagement with elemental landscapes—volcanic craters, glacial expanses, irradiated wastelands, and the deep ocean—his work interrogates how we imagine the natural world, and how we inhabit it. Throughout, Charrière explores human impact on earth systems, probing the role that visual culture plays in mediating our understanding of environmental transformation. All the while, his practice cultivates a poetics of uncertainty, inviting viewers to confront the mutability of nature.
With the video Midnight Zone, Charrière takes viewers on a hallucinatory journey into the ocean’s abyss. Descending through the water column, a Fresnel lighthouse lens—a tool to aid navigation—guides the film downward, metre by metre, through teeming schools of fish and sharks—theirs whirling figures glinting like a thousand fluid mirrors around the light source; so many aquatic moths to a flame. As its powerful light beam spins through the deep, slicing through darkness, the surrounding gyre of swimming creatures becomes a living kaleidoscope. Following the falling lamp’s initial submersion, it attracts more biomass with every passing fathom, until a point of crescendo, after which the giddy swarm slowly thins out. This decrease registers of the great depths achieved by the probe. By the end of the filmic sequence, captured by an underwater drone piloted by the artist, the lamp has arrived at the beginning of an aquatic threshold: a domain otherwise impervious to light, too deep for photons from the sun to penetrate—the so-called ‘midnight zone’. This is a realm that begins one kilometre below the surface, extending even deeper. Here, photosynthesis-driven growth of phytoplankton and aquatic plants is impossible. The animal inhabitants look strange, having evolved within the extreme atmospheric pressure and total darkness. Many, dwelling close to the ocean floor, have yet to be discovered. What alien life might inhabit this place?
While the film is mute on this matter—for all its construction and spectacle, it remains a document—Charriere’s sculptures indulge in speculation. A Stone Dream of You transforms the gallery surrounding the video into a primordial tableau, where lava-forged objects lurk like denizens of this strange world—hunched mineral lumps evoking the uncanny stillness of creatures adapted to an abyss. Hidden far below the surface, deep-sea volcanoes—discovered only in the late 20th century—harbour ecosystems that exist without sunlight, including ‘extremophiles’ that draw vitality from Earth’s tectonic metabolism, feeding on gases and minerals toxic to other life. With jagged surfaces studded with obsidian spheres, suggestive of black eyes, these sculptures conjure alien beings born in the chemical haze of hydrothermal vents. Blurring biology, geology, and myth, they appear to resist the Cartesian split between matter and mind, staging a latent animism science has sought to erase. In them, familiar marine iconography dissolves into bathypelagic fantasy.
As Midnight Zone attests, we humans can now enter the extreme subaquatic realm with the help of our tools. In turn, this space becomes subject to our trans-atmospheric agency. In fact, deep-sea mining companies have set their sights on mineral deposits on and below the seafloor—a prospect with catastrophic implications for marine ecology. With all sea layers linked by food chains, energy flows, and currents, any disturbance can disrupt the balance. Charriere’s work dives into this issue. Midnight Zone was filmed in the waters above the Clarion–Clipperton Fracture, an area whose seabed is a potential mining ground—rich in polymetallic nodules. In this light, the presence of the Fresenel illuminates the extractive optic that views any region of the planet as a potential site for exploitation. The dark eyes of Charrière’s sculptures—their forms recalling, too, the nodules sought by the miners—return this regard. Made of obsidian, dark volcanic glass long associated with divination and prophesy, they are material icons for foresight and speculation.
Where Midnight Zone confronts the consequences of human incursion into the ocean’s depths, Veils shifts focus to the residues such incursions leave behind, offering a more intimate, materially embedded mode of bearing witness. Veils are a series of quasi-photographs that feature coral reefs, made out of the very scenery depicted. With them, the artist has departed from modern printing methods and instead constructed a material language grounded in the ecology of the sites themselves. Coral, already bleached and lifeless, was ground into pigment—transforming the remains of the reef into the chromatic register of the prints. These pigments, layered through an archaic photolithographic technique using limestone plates, bind the image to its referent at the level of substance. The result is a series of prints in which image and matter are inseparable; where presence flickers against the backdrop of loss. Here, Charrière further explores the collapse of documentation and what he calls ‘residue’ of a given environment. Indeed, the works articulate a space where disappearance becomes legible. In this way, the series opens a dialogue with ecological and cultural forms of memory.
At bottom, Charrière’s practice resists the impulse to simply render the invisible visible, or to moralize the ecological sublime. Instead, his works invite us to dwell in states of suspension—between seeing and unseeing, between presence and erasure, extraction and memory. What becomes clear is that the most distant terrains—deep ocean trenches, volcanic vents, bleached reefs—are not far-off frontiers, but mirrors. They reflect not only the impacts of human action, but the fragility of our epistemologies, the limits of our instruments, and the precarious architectures of knowledge itself. In an age defined by hyper-visibility and relentless exposure, Charrière suggests that it is in the residues, the afterimages, and the silences where something like understanding might begin to take shape.