Vincent Lariau, a passionate photographer for nearly 30 years, has dedicated his life to capturing and reinventing the essence of urban landscapes.
Self-taught after spending a year in a preparatory art workshop for the Fine Arts, he lives and works between France and Ecuador. Alongside his professional career in graphic design, publishing, and packaging, he has continually cultivated and deepened his photographic practice over the years. From an early age, his artistic vision and sensitivity were profoundly influenced by major movements of Modern Art such as cubism, futurism, constructivism, and surrealism. Artists like Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Alexandre Rodtchenko, and Mark Rothko have left an indelible mark on his aesthetic, inspiring him to develop a unique style that fuses these concepts.
Drawn to the rhythmic repetition of geometric shapes and the interplay of light, color, and materials, Lariau focuses his lens on the urban landscapes of business districts, industrial zones, and construction sites. Using the structures of these “ultra-urban” environments as a starting point, he seeks to create images that resemble cubist-constructivist paintings in tones of steel, concrete, glass, and wood. Although his images might appear to depict a different reality, they are simply photographs of our world, either autonomously framed or with a simple vertical and horizontal mirror effect. The visual effects created are ultimately an amplification of reality and its subjective perspectives.
This approach has allowed him to emphasize the geometric structures, colors, and rhythms that compose the urban environment, inventing a new reality from reality itself. His work invites viewers to reinterpret the everyday, offering a fresh and dynamic perspective on landscapes that often go unnoticed. [Official Website]