CHUTE DE NEIGE

Created during a journey along the roads of Gaspésie, Quebec, the series Chute de neige takes us far from the vast wilderness landscapes commonly associated with the region. Along the roadside, Thibault Belouis turns his attention to the ordinary dwellings scattered across the territory.

The house is the central motif of this exploration: isolated homes, gabled façades, modest buildings, and standardized constructions. Through frontal compositions, the photographer isolates these structures, closes off the horizon, and flattens perspectives, blurring any clear sense of scale.

Image after image, a strange sense of déjà vu emerges, as shapes, lines, and materials seem to form a familiar, almost interchangeable visual vocabulary. Although people are absent from the photographs, their presence remains pervasive. It is embedded in the buildings, the alterations to the landscape, and the traces of habitation that reveal how we inhabit and shape our surroundings. The residents remain outside the frame, yet the marks they leave behind quietly tell the story of these places.

An unsettling atmosphere runs through the series, reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's cinema: an open-air chamber drama, where the houses seem to await both their occupants and their spectators.

Following in the tradition of the New Topographics, a photographic movement that emerged in the United States in the 1970s, Thibault Belouis develops a visual typology of ordinary forms. Yet where this tradition examined the ways humans transform the landscape, Chute de neige introduces a more ambiguous, almost theatrical dimension, in which reality seems on the verge of slipping into artifice.

The title, borrowed from a roadside warning sign found along the roads of Gaspésie, encapsulates the underlying tension running through the series: an impending threat, an inevitable event that unsettles the familiarity of these landscapes.