In "Context as content", the third essay he published in Artforum in 1976, Brian O'Doherty demonstrated the firm hold of the white cube on the practice of art. "One cannot dismiss the white wall out of hand, but one can comprehend it. And this comprehension transforms it, because its content is made up of mental projections founded on non-formulated prejudices. The wall is our prejudice. And it is vital for the artist to know this content, and the way it affects his or her work. [...] It safeguards the possibility of art, while at the same time making it difficult." ¹

Aurélie Pétrel, in her conception of the photographic, and of photography, works on relationships to place and wall, so that the image becomes one of the constituent parts of the work whose object is to be found in an interplay between the image, its substrate and its exhibition space, with which she not only questions the place and status of each but also multiplies possibilities through what Foucault called "strategies of power relationships that sustain types of knowledge, and are in turn sustained by them." ² The function of the substrate is not just a question of legibility; it takes on visibility. Pursuing her examination of the regulatory conventions that stabilise sense - the white wall, the position of the image on the wall, the framing, etc. - Aurélie manipulates, in a performative way, metal plates, plain or micro-perforated, as impossible underpinnings of which she seems to mimic a central aspect, producing a work in the place of an image. Everything is related to a space of stages, screens, systems of representations in which the human, taking an apparent ancillary role, is the object that legitimises all illusion. The gaze of her subjects - labourers or packers, active or passive - is often directed elsewhere, and guides our interpretation: from architectural images, built up in planes, to real space, for example the cube into which a photograph has been inserted. Visually speaking, the viewer does not actually end up in the framework of the image; a dialogue takes place between the plane surface of the photograph and the viewer's space. The play of hypothetical reflections maintains the illusion of an "inner" and an "outer", while the cube, like the metal and glass plates, probes the concepts of space and art. Aurélie Pétrel toys with the White Cube, manipulating this sepulchre of modernist scenographic conventions that Schwitters and Lissitzky transformed as they colonised it with their collages. The structures lead to a two-phase perception: the eye assimilates everything, sliding into the image; then the body leads the eye on a voyage of exploration. Eye and body cooperate, and not only in the choice of a real or conceptual analysis but also in backing up sense with a deflection of the subject itself.

Aurélie defines her photography with respect to the classical image, i.e. painting as an iconic reference point, far from any referent. Her compositional choices favour the constructive force of architectural elements - walls, pylons, telephone lines, power cables, roofs, windows and openings, screen-type surfaces - in a spatial conception inherited from Piero della Francesca, which unifies the energy of reason and the sensibility of mind. The photographed space is not a decor, any more than the painted space in Piero's work. It consists of an indefinite, almost monochrome, landscape, or building(s) whose interior-exterior dialectic is enacted both within and between images. And there is no visual escape from the reality of the image as a plane. Which does not mean that the question of illusion is circumvented. Its immanence is revealed in the object-image, including the three-dimensional structures which, in real space, modify our relationship to the image, but also the perception of all images, as both displacement and production of sense. It is a game of mirrors - a throwback to polyptychs, and to the light that is constructive within the image itself, the real light that traverses the surfaces of the window stickers ³ in which the fragile human frame is delivered up to the world of human construction. Its vulnerability, as much as its strength, is what is apprehended by Aurélie Pétrel's photography, even in the form of an infinitesimal, almost insignificant detail that nonetheless, in the order of the image, becomes figurational, particularly through the action of colour, which, apart from structuring space, creates subtle relations between the different elements. When materialised on an opaque plane, it is a screen for projection in the literal sense. When acting in transparency it inverts the relationship to the subject, pushing it down into the image. It is homogeneous when foliage is treated as an organised space, an infinity of details and nuances, or textural effects, thus renewing the experience of photographic banality through a steady eye that can see how light corrupts all form. Emphasising frontality, the lure of narration is resisted in favour of a reflection on what an image constitutes. Aurélie Pétrel's implementations are not so much scenographies as instantiations of images.