The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories

The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories I, 2013

The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories is the photographic trace of an artistic intervention the artist staged in 2013, traveling to Iceland to climb an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean and melt the frozen water beneath his feet with a gas torch for eight hours. Like an absurd, quixotic hero, Julian Charrière confronts the elements in a seemingly hopeless battle—human time against geological time. And yet, a battle of which global warming is only the starting point. What remains of this perilous endeavor are three photographs of arresting beauty, a kind of contemporary version of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Overlooking the Sea of Fog (1817-18), and a questioning of our relation to nature as inherited from the Romantics via ecological thought.

The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories II, 2013
The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories III, 2013
The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories, Detail, 2013
The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories, Detail, 2013