"The Seventh Circle", an exhibition presented at Bibracte from 14 May, was inspired to photographer Régis Perrot by Canto XIII of Dante's Inferno and by the illustrations produced by Gustave Doré for the 1861 Hachette edition.
It is a journey into the forest for strange encounters with trees and the opening to the eternal in an infinite space of creation, beautiful and terrifying at the same time.
The seventh circle draws a parallel between the artist's experience in 2020, Dante's journey into the afterlife in 1300 and Gustave Doré's pictorial interpretation in the 19th century. It is the temporal perspective of a part of a universal literary text and founder of Western culture.
Between religion and mythology, the meaning of life, the salvation of souls and eternal damnation, Dante's text opens the way to fantasy and the poetry of the image. In these photographs, each visitor will find his or her own interpretation and make his or her own journey.
No other place than Bibracte, "the city sunken under the forest", was better suited to host the creation of this project, at the crossroads of ancient and future worlds, where time merges and the ephemerality of our lives merges into the multitude. The great passage is perhaps here, somewhere buried under this Morvan earth, in the abandoned city...
This exhibition is an invitation to inner journeys, to the forest, to history and to the reading of Dante.
RÉGIS PERROT
Régis Perrot lives in the Morvan. He has been practising photography since the 1980s. Self-taught, his meeting with the great theatre photographer Nicolas Treatt allowed him to complete and perfect his technique through a poetic and artisanal approach to photography.
In the 1980s, he devoted himself more particularly to black and white interior portraits and also produced a few reportages. From the 90s onwards, he turned to nature and wide open spaces. His approach to landscapes consists of sublimating the image by manually colouring his black and white prints. From his travels in Canada, the exhibition "Le bout du fleuve" was born.
Régis Perrot's photographic work often draws its inspiration from literary or poetic works.
He has held or participated in several solo and group exhibitions in France and Germany.