Gloss designed to lead the reader thoroughly astray. There is no use in discussing it, my lord inspector of taste and colour, you will unearth no dark secret from beneath these images that tantalise both retinal and reason. Everything you see here is turned on its head: at once within, without and all around the absolutely normal, since the engines of possibility have pushed themselves to the limit to reveal to us the fruits pilfered by Pierre Boulat from the labyrinthine orchards of quantum mechanics. If we were to use liturgical language, we could call it Epiphany……

The Big Bang of his adventure exploded in 1972, on a road in the Kalahari Desert when a 4 x 4 Landrover carrying Pierre Boulat collided with a truck. Different elements were sucked into the black hole created by the collision, and were there tossed around until they reached critical mass: the tools hen from bone from the opening of “2001: A Space Odyssey”, for which the crash victim had just instigated and photographed the first space waltz; the fogging of the same patient’s cerebral convolutions by the white vapours of the morphine that was afterwards administered to him; a sequence of diaphragm openings and focal distances whose numeric language mingle effortlessly wit Max Planck’ equations; and finally an unoriginal explosion of poppies glimpsed in a meadow on a Beauce Plain. The latter sowed the seed of imagination and triggered the poppy-seed memory, the rest went into constructing and filling the still where the whole was then brewed and distilled.

You’ve guessed it. The journey here undertaken started on the runway pad of a hospital bed. “Like a little poppy, my love…” to enjoy its wonders, you simply have to follow the guide. Just as Max Ernst enhanced the magic of his paintings with titles that integrated their substance to expand their magic, monsieur Boulat carries the song of his images on into his capricious captions.

Dominique Eudes