An exhibition focusing on the fragility of our landscape by Malta-based French photographer will kick off in Gozo on Saturday.

A student of architecture and graduate of Beaux Arts de Rennes, Cyril Sancereau specialises in the photography of architecture and landscape. 

Cyril Sancereau. Photo: Alan Carville

His works deliberately exclude all identifying features of place. By choosing to produce only autonomous images, detached from any context, he seeks to retain from his wanderings only traces of the fragile and ephemeral.

His work will be presented in an exhibition at Lazuli Art gallery between March 16 and April 7.

He spent the month of February in Gozo, as an artist in residence. To focus more on the perception than on the subject, he deliberately chose black and white, and the square, format, and excluded all specificities of place to create an image out of time, geography and social construct. The composition, the texture and the light reveal an abstract and timeless landscape.

"All these years I walked the Gozitan paths, often the same ones, each time discovering something different, or simply a detail revealing itself under another light. It was thanks to Gozo, amongst other places, that I became aware of the landscape's perpetual movement.

"The disappearance of the Azure Window reminds us every day that this territory is fragile, and its shape can change dramatically overnight. Gozo awakens in me not only a feeling of calm and serenity but also the feeling of an "inquiétante étrangeté" (“disturbing strangeness”). It is this contradiction that fascinates me and that I photograph tirelessly."

With his images, Sancereau tries to give a closer account of this visceral transformation of the subject in, and by, the place in which it evolves.

The exhibition in 83, Palm Street, Victoria is open on Mondays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 10 am to 1pm.