“Images are everywhere where imagination takes you” writes Nicolas Bouvier. After an imagination messenger, he becomes an iconographer. An occupation as rare as the one of “rat charmer” he precises. Throughout his life, he enhances pages of fine books and magazines with rare and unique illustrations. Abandoning distant roads, he pushes open libraries’ heavy doors to reveal in there some lost visions, without forgetting to visit some photographs he knows well. Turning pages of manuscripts, botanical or alchemical treatises, he chooses by the first look: the absolute eye. This visual quest, on top of being alimentary, nourishes a true aesthetical, historical and literarian commitment. In thirty years, he composes the iconography of more than sixty-five illustrated publications. Forty thousand pictures, fruits of his rabelaisian picking, are stored into the Bibliothèque de Genève, of which his father was director in the past.
Nicolas Bouvier acquires the reproduction of “Ejiri in Suruga’s province”. A famous flight of leaves engraved by Katsushika Hokusai in 1830 for his Thirty-six views on Mount Fuji. Sixty years later, Jeff Wall replays, next to Vancouver, this scene of the Japanese master and prints it on a light box. The Canadian artist, contemporary life’s iconographer, edits A sudden gush of wind (after Hokusai) as an image cut into 98 sheets.
In Jeff Wall’s art, as in Nicolas Bouvier’s, don’t go looking for Mount Fuji on the sunset. This absence is a true mystery. Why did the Genevan, born in front of Mont-Blanc, neglect the visual symbol of a nation? You will find absolutely no Mount Fuji in his books and only two negatives show it in profile, yet they have never been extended. The photographer-writer rather lets himself get seduced by the elongated reliefs of the Typhoons Islands. He prefers the invitation to travel on the inner sea.