Etienne PERRONE

"Dreams Happen After Dark"

As a child, I fell asleep inventing worlds. On a train, in a waiting room, during long evenings of boredom, my mind drifted toward lives that did not exist. I never really stopped. There is a kind of frustration in me, tied to how intense a life could be — the feeling of often living at the edge of something. Traveling alone, walking at night through a city whose language I don’t speak, is the surest way I have found to come closer to it. Out there, the streets empty out, the city falls silent, and tiny things take on an immense presence: the hum of a neon light, an air conditioner, a drop of water, my own footsteps. My attention becomes intensely focused on the outside world, and yet I have never gone so far inside myself. I am drawn to a less obvious kind of beauty. I stop in front of the places everyone walks past: a back alley, a parking lot, a doorway left lit behind a closed shop. It is there, between banality and strangeness, that something begins to exist. Light shifts perception and, suddenly, the world seems to contain more than itself. These photographs belong to films whose stories have been lost. The characters are absent, yet everything still seems to bear their trace. That strangeness is everywhere, even in daylight. Night simply makes it easier to see. Each image holds one of those brief moments, almost epiphanies, when ordinary life opens up and feels larger. I am no longer sure this is simply an artistic practice. It has become a way of living, and a way of looking at the world.