Matthieu Venot: Dreamy and Pastel Images of Urban Architecture

Artistic Urban Landscapes

     Every day we pass through the same streets going to work and back home, without paying attention to familiar parts of the street, city corners and arcades. Some of us are, probably, always in a hurry, constantly looking at the cell phones, having no time to look above. Photographer Matthieu Venot slowed down, took his camera and recognized the new life of the same, familiar places. He started photography in 2009, but 2014 was the year when his serious work began. Since then, he shoots ordinary urban landscapes, making them artistic.

Shine and Glow of the City Core by Matthieu Venot

Matthieu Venot first worked in the music industry, as a sound engineer, and then discovered his desire to show the other picture of his hometown in Brittany, France, through the lens of a camera. He took photos of the urban architecture by selecting only the parts of the buildings, walls, staircases, liberating a new look to them. This seems like an easy thing to do, but to makes it artistic, it needs to be more than just zooming and cropping various parts of the scene. The photographs express a really new reality, making us thinking: Are these places really possible in our surrounding?
For one we can be sure – he succeeded not only to relocate us into a different space but also move us through time. Pastel colors inside the city walls and bly sky evoke earlier decades – 1960 or 1970.

Utopia

Matthieu Venot is well known for his series of photos made in Brest – his hometown and the city of his inspiration. As numerous articles aim, these photos are real art pieces of minimalistic photography. These images represent the other kind of the city in Brittany – with the sunlight and blue sky above, Brest looks more like some city in California or Florida. The photographer agenda to focus on specific building angles, in addition, gave exciting and inspiring images.

Matthieu composes abstract images. He waits for the bright sunny day to take photos of the facades, walls, balconies, roof, banister. In this way, the photographer creates a daydreaming color palette of the surfaces.
The specific textures and pastel colors, as well as powerful geometrical compositions, make the photographer’s work unique and describe his own worldview. The artistic photos of the urban space mediate the photographer’s personal enthusiasm.