A Vision of Life's Energy Revealed

Pierre Carreau’s AquaViva Series:

The physical realm of our existence, of the world around us, can be turned to artistic purposes in an endless variety of ways. In the act of creating a work, the artist’s intent may be to convey a message. It may be to shock the viewer with radical or unexpected idea. An impressionist landscape may evoke memories that remind us of the passing of time. A portrait may offer the viewer hidden clues to the subject’s personality or life. When considered alongside the multitude of motives that artists bring to their work, the AquaViva series by Pierre Carreau achieves a rendering of emotion in its purest form. Though seemingly monomorphic, these images carry inside them the range of human emotion.

Comprising a series of outwardly similar yet wildly varying shots of water in motion, AquaViva is all the more remarkable when we consider that nature presents to us this vibrant energy daily wherever the ocean meets the shore. We are incapable of capturing these fleeting masterpieces with our own eyes, however, for the movement is too swift, and the tumultuous action of the waves too distracting in its kinetic form.

In the infinite iterations and sublimely unpredictable qualities of water, Carreau captures and offers to us an appreciation of the fundamental and essential role it plays on the planet and in our existence. The gentle sweep of a wave's rising surface in one image may call to mind the rejuvenating and purifying effects of water. The brilliance of light refracted through a single droplet suspended in mid-air at the leading edge of a spilling arch makes us think of the element's vital function in our lives and in the life of the planet. And the location itself, the border between the vast sea and terra firma, evokes the primal step of life’s earliest migration.