Patrick Collandre’s photos, Encres (Inks), give the impression of having burst out of the unconscious or a dream and lead the viewer into the fascinaing and ambiguous game of metamorphosis. The photographic metamorphosis, primordial dramatic phenomenon, according to Nietzsche, represents above all the priviledged place where the construction of a mystery is revealed. A mystery which, in Collandre’s work, very much resembles a recipe. With his ingredients, utensils, reactions and stewing times.          Painter in the school of surrealist Yves Tanguy, photographer and above all perfectionist creator of the artificial, Patrick Collandre is only really at home amongst his instruments, distilling matter in order to drag “realistic” objects out of it. Objects which the slightest “anomaly” will differentiate them from slavish copies and make them engaging, fragile, humanised. These artificial realities, or fantastic clones, often created for prestidgeous advertising campaigns, never fail to unsettle the viewer: paintbrush hairs ressemble daffodil buds, a tortoiseshell marries the form of a shoe, vinestock cut like bonzai... So many “tricks”, or rather stories, that Patrick Collandre likes to divulge with gourmand precision.          Similarly for, "Encres", this astonishing underwater explosion which seems to well up from the depths and break the surface of the still water, or again the “landscape” of solidified whirlpools which rise up towards a starry sky won’t fail to partially reveal the subterranean forces which animate them. To make them appear it’s enough to simply invert the image. This will then show all that is brewing under the surface of the liquid: “They are drops of ink which I throw onto the surface of a liquid of different density and viscosity.” Explains the creator. “I take a photograph at 1/10 000 th of a second of their descent in a 25cm diameter aquarium on which I have placed a transparency representing clouds, for example. The drops subsequently reflect the setting sun...” Then a little touching up on Photoshop to perfect the colorimetry and to remove some “noise”, and the trick is done. The image presents both the metamorphosis and that which provoked it (the ends and the means).          With dizzying overlaps, not unlike the famous composition with fish by M.C. Escher, the images drive the viewers back into themselves and forever keep the secret of the living... It is wiser, furthermore, to interpret in our own way the almost biblically simplistic meeting of elements (water, oil, ink) and get lost in the lunar landscapes, the etherial architectures or the fantasmagoric beings of mind-blowing complexity... Similarly for the ink spatters created by Victor Hugo, Les Tâches du Surréel (The Marks of the Surreal), signifying indifferently, vegetable, animal or human figure, the material the images, as long as the ink is thick enough,escapes us. Is it liquid, or a mineral arangement? Smoke or gas swirls?          Certainly these models, which owe nothing to the technology of microscopes or telescopes, or even fractal algorithms, attract our imagination.          The art of Patrick Collandre, who daily does his craft of illusion, consists of being present during these metamorphic experiments and showing them to us, just for once, without artifice.                                                                                          Annik Hémery