Reflection

All installation views: Timo Ohler

Jean-Luc Mylayne has devoted his life to philosophical questions about our place on Earth—questions for which birds and their natural habitats serve as both subject and symbol, and through which he probes what it means to be human alongside nature.

Made in close collaboration with his life partner, Mylène, each photograph is the result of months of patient work, a sustained investigation into temporality, perception and community. Coeval with the height of early debates about the Anthropocene, the images on view in Reflection, presented at Sprüth Magers, Berlin, on the occasion of Berlin Art Week, have only deepened in urgency since.

The majority of these images were conceived during a residency in Marfa, Texas, where Mylayne was drawn to the intense shades of blue found in the water and sky, and sometimes in the birds themselves.

N°498 – 499, Janvier Février Mars 2007 (2007) is exemplary in this regard. The diptych depicts a pair of mountain bluebirds, a female and a male, perched atop two dried stalks before an expansive, arid landscape, with a distant mountain on the horizon. In the left panel, both face outward into that vastness; in the right, their heads have shifted to the left, as though peering back at their previous selves. The work holds both moments at once, a meditation on time and presence in a landscape that predates any human claim to it.