Matter is the evolution of an immutable now. The mind, its witness, records its trajectory in time. Realizing the fatal direction his body is bound for, man wants to escape from it.  Through images, he fabricates gods and ideal places where the mind can find a refuge. Man develops beliefs in his images, and thus increasingly detaches himself from materiality. But this duality fades away with the loss of faith whose icons are now too disconnected from reality. Contemporary man wants to reintegrate himself into materiality. But paradoxically, it is through images and technological prosthesis that he returns to the real. He simulates the mental image, memories, travels in time and space and continues to create fictions and ideal places, but now they have become a seamless extension of the real. This hybrid reality is a space that we inhabit without being fully there, a space where past and future coexist with the present and where presence and absence are inextricably woven. It is the fear of death that make us divide body and mind, matter and image and for the same reason we attempt to dematerialize, to become an image.

I live this confusion within the practice of my art. It informs its very medium and provides its substance. I explore this conflict between escaping the real through the image and anchoring oneself to the real through matter. I attempt to reunite matter and its image, presence and absence, here and there, before and now. Thus many of my works integrate a form of simultaneity, where images instead of detaching themselves from matter, reflect themselves upon it.

HAIKU REVIEW: MARC FICHOU plays almost shamelessly with form and perception, turning shapes over and over, opening them up and closing them down, reflecting them, lighting them up, employing all manner of devices at once to expose and to hide the nature of structure. It's not all done with mirrors, but a lot of it is, which serves not only to lay things bare and obscure them simultaneously, but to involve, even inculcate, the viewer in this game of mind against eye. Fichou has conflated the lessons of his countrymen Descartes and Breton into a Zen koan: I see, therefore I no longer know. - Peter Frank