What does an image become when it seeks to go beyond the mere surface and fully embody
itself in matter? How can a photograph summon buried memory, make the invisible vibrate, and become a vessel of presence?
In collaboration with Photo Days
These questions run through the reflections of Alexandre Onimus and find a singular resonance in his series “Yet, night has not fallen”, created during a 2023 residency at the Verrecchia Endowment Fund.
Rejecting the notion of the image as purely flat or endlessly reproducible, the artist embraces a
form of photography that is tangible, organic, almost mineral. For him, the image only comes
alive when it becomes an object — a sensitive surface, a fragile skin, a site of apparition. Each
print is the result of a slow and intuitive process, balancing technical mastery with the art of
letting go.
To pursue this quest, Alexandre Onimus turns to one of the oldest non-silver monochrome processes: cyanotype, in which a vivid yellow exposed to sunlight transforms into Prussian blue. But in his work, this blue is not merely chemical — it becomes atmosphere, vibration, breath. Applied to mineral surfaces such as marble or limestone, the artist engages in a deep dialogue with the inner matter of stone. Dense and smooth, marble holds the image close to the surface; limestone, more porous, absorbs and diffuses it, revealing accidents and subterranean textures. What the stone holds in silence, light gradually brings to life.
By rooting itself in this mineral dimension, the cyanotype connects to an archaic memory — that of petroglyphs, where ancestral civilizations engraved their stories, mythical figures, and cosmic beliefs. The artist rekindles these vanished traces. From the stone, anthropomorphic silhouettes emerge, as if reviving a long-submerged ritual in which the sun and moon were once revered. The sun-man, who illuminates, imprints, and reveals, dances with the moon-man, who absorbs, transforms, and keeps watch in the shadows.
Between these two poles, light becomes breath, and gesture becomes ritual. The blue of the cyanotype merges with that of the blue hour — that fragile moment when day fades but night has not yet fallen. Light is born at the fingertips, forging an immaterial connection between sky and earth, a symbiosis between the lunar and solar bodies.
It is within this in-between that Alexandre Onimus’s images take shape: neither fully present nor entirely gone, they inhabit a threshold. They do not document — they evoke. They do not fix — they allow an uncertain presence, a suspended memory, to surface.