San Damon : Art photographer and plasic artist born in Paris in 1972,creates about the year 2000 the Oniroscopism,in short,dream and movement. At the end of differernt film and photo studies,he decides to capture the reality of these subjects in pratical experience.During some years he leaves Europe for the United States and finally stays 11 months in Brasil in order to explore the inappropriate conditions of all kind of discovery.

Art is certainly something you have to possess beyond the learned technique,the own discoveries and the failures are indisputable successes for those who know and have the appetite for catching them,for transforming and,above all,turning them into trumps.

IIn 1998 he begins to wander away from the traditional view we have of this art. His approach is characterized by a very personal search concerning the colours,he finally finds what will from that moment on be « his colours »,thanks to which themes,often treated by others,get in Damon’s work a totally new originality.It will be the question of the enlargement of his works without loss of sharpness that he will have to resolve.

Different projets,always related to photography,keep him busy during some time before,in the beginning of the years 2000,he finds the solution;difficult to know how,because he protects the secret of his technique,which is quite understandable.What we know is that it was by marrying the product of new searches and experiences to the results obtained years before that he formed the key of the problem,key that he protects with a patent.

So here we have the way the artist builds his photographic world,a world inundated with light,a very important value to him.If he should give a definition of his art,he would say,we quote him: « Disorganized allusion of the identity where light is only an illusion,…

the darkness being the truth of the lie ».In other words,he upsets the concrete,mixes up the evidence and so obtains a sort of disguised reality.

Oniroscopism : Genesis of a photographic language through the birth of a process. Articulated on three main points :

Light : Damon works on the light to transform it the moment he shoots his photo and continues the transformation when developping it. His light is striking because of its presence and it almost takes the place of a major character on its own.

Colors: His technique allows a large a full array of colours where are present all the shadings going either from ocre to Sienna or from grey to blue.If the red and yellow colours can disturb the spectator,they aren’t obtained by chance.The artist wants them to be as we see them in his works,one could speak of uncertain colours. The power of the black colour has also to be mentioned for it upholds and brings out all the others.

Angles: It’s in a mysterious way that the angles are distorted as in a trompe l’oeil and we don’t get aware of it immediately. And above all it’s impossible for us to explain this phenomenon which is easy to obtain in paintings,but photography simply shows reality as it is.Here we wonder if once photographed by Damon the world is still the one in which we live.And if silver film is unavoidable in his technique,its also the indispensable condition for his depths of field and for the enlargement of his works,but it’s also what makes the distorted angles impossible to understand.

As a conclusion we can say that oniroscopism makes us fall into another world.The witness,for that’s what we become,plunges as if he’s despoiled of all his usual knowledge,he is nude and thrown into the immensity of a strange world never seen before;the chromatic vertigo takes him away.

Something strange comes over him,he is the spectator of his own surprise,that of not recognizing what he however should perfectly well know.

Some artists,and of course photographs,have tried to copy or to get close to Damon’s technique by using other methods.

The emotion and the technique are here taken to their utmost expression,….isn’t it after all what art is about ? !