Dominique Teufen’s landscapes evoke a wild and untouched nature. The mountain rises sublimely against a misty sky, the sea licks the hot sand, the water shimmers, night falls on a salt desert. These black and white images recall those of mountaineer-explorers laden with heavy equipment climbing peaks to immortalise faults and escarpments. They suggest the grandiose, glossy views of National Geographic, tired from having been looked at too much. They recall the millions of pictures taken by tourists soullessly photographing the same landscapes in every corner of the world. This prodigious moment lasts a fraction of a second, a few moments perhaps, and then our perception realises it has been fooled. It becomes disillusioned. There is no sweat or sunscreen here: the artist questions both the conditioning of the spectator and the boundary between representation and illusion. To create these “trompe l’oeil”, she uses a photocopier on which she cleverly arranges paper, plastic and objects. Teufen, whose career began with the study of sculpture, inverts the intrinsic qualities of photography through her material experimentation. She offers us the photo album of a fictitious trip made in the studio. An ode to the inner life and imagination that is apprehended in a totally different way when the only horizon is four walls.

Dominique Teufen was born in 1975 in Davos. She lives and works in Zurich and Amsterdam.