There’s majestic, spectacular botany, like the herbarium in scientific collections and natural history museums. But there is also humble botany, the botany of roadsides, that which grows by the unstoppable force of biology and doesn’t allow itself to be artificialized or aestheticized, and which exists as a demonstration that despite all adversity nature shows that it will find a way to survive. Botany is chaotic and spontaneous; botany refuses order and manifests itself as a superposition of grasses, stems, spikes, leaves and roots.
At dusk, along the rural paths, Sylvie Bussières takes a few photos and draws the experience. One pencil stroke, and another, and another, with almost obsessive insistence. The result is a saturated drawing, crammed with pencil strokes that cover the paper like the pine needles and moss that cover the undergrowth. The movement of the plants makes the Chinese shadows dance on his drawings. Sometimes the cut-out silhouette of a fern, or the splendid leaves of a fig tree, sometimes a sprig of broom. But almost always abstract graphics, deep shadows that add an unfathomable mystery to the textures. She then uses photography to capture this interplay of light and darkness. The plant matter has left an imprint, and the pencil allows us to touch with our fingers the wounds that furrow the flesh of the paper.