Aurélie Pétrel puts speed into phenomenological principles relating to the experience of vision, the tangible manifestation of reality and the appearance of its photographic double, melting and merging them into one another. With her acceptance of photography becoming images, and thus figures, she undertakes the deconstruction of the medium's spatio-temporal properties - the perceptible and the noetic - probing the processes of perception and representation of reality so as to demonstrate the process of abstraction itself. Her works are visual theorems that circumscribe the betrayal of images. For her, the technical and conceptual aspects of using photography to produce images (in the sense of metaphors) supply the structure, and the instruments, of exegesis. But the work of interpretation, appropriation, comprehension and apprehension of the image (and images) remains to be done (and redone). Pétrel provides photographic, topographic, semantic and cognitive experiences in which support, surface, space and context multiply possibilities. Such are the mechanics of revelation, in that we know reality only through its action on our nervous system. We achieve an understanding of it by inventing sets of symbols and relations whose structures we try to bring into correspondence with those of the "objects" we study. Pétrel's work is articulated onto the status of the image, from its appearance to its materiality. Her most recent photographic installations, for example ...que nuage...#2 ("...but cloud...#2"), 2010, which can be assimilated to sculpture, are precisely concerned with the tensions that exist between reality and its photographic double - and vice versa.
Her creativity draws on a number of complex photographic techniques, illusions and displacements of reality. She designs visual and conceptual structures that are materially simple, with diasec-mounted superimpositions of reflections, transparencies and opacities (in Montperrin, Backstage, 2009), photographs printed on adhesive film mounted directly onto transparent spaces, volumes, buildings or structures (in Shakkei I and Shakkei II, 2009), and projects involving direct printing and engraving on glass plates (in Tokyo Bay, 2010). The architecture of the image is superimposed onto that of a place or an object to create a new "view", a new experience of perceptions, images and their reality. Images become elements of architecture and urbanism; objects and edifices become images, spaces for mental, sociological, metaphorical and metaphysical projections - those of a silent, distant reality which, though possible, is absent. Aurélie Pétrel's photographic installations give material expression to this absence of reality, and she transforms the concept of photographic technique in such a way as to establish the rules of a double game. A certain complicity springs up between the work and the world. The boundaries between image and context, memory and imagination disappear, so that the work reveals as much as it conceals.