Galerie Maubert presents from November 6 to December 20 a solo exhibition by Nicolas Floc’h, bringing together three series from his Productive Landscapes corpus — Initium Maris, The Color of Water and Deep Sea — and featuring exclusively photographs taken in the artist’s native Brittany.

For nearly a decade, Nicolas Floc’h has been developing pioneering work on the representation of underwater landscapes. Enriched by exchanges with scientific teams and local communities, his photographs document habitats, transformations, and the fragile balances that shape the ocean.

Entirely devoted to the Breton coastline, Initium Maris (2018-2021) is an artistic expedition carried out by the artist aboard the ketch OAO across 65 sites, from Saint-Nazaire to Saint-Malo. These images form a unique archive of panoramic views of submarine landscapes at a given moment in time, in a context deeply marked by climate change.

The Color of Water explores the chromatic variations of the marine environment, revealing its biological composition and the pressures exerted by human activity. From the warm tones of rivers, where forest and land infuse, to the blue-green hues of the ocean, water reveals an astonishing diversity of shades. Finally, Deep Sea offers a rare window onto the great depths, between 700 and 1800 meters: the only series produced with artificial light, it brings forth a previously unseen aesthetic of the abyss.

Balancing documentary precision with poetic resonance, these three complementary series invite us to acknowledge the richness of Brittany’s seascapes, as well as the complexity and vulnerability of a world both invisible and essential.

20,000 years ago, during the Ice Age, the Ponant islands were the highest points of the plains of the continental shelf—emerged reliefs, visible on the horizon [1].  

As sea levels rose, these lands gradually detached from the continent, altering their accessibility—now requiring the crossing of the ocean surface by boat—and transforming the dynamics of their surroundings, which became maritime territories. This “new space,” exposed to the transformative effects of aquatic life and the power of the elements, thus shifted from an emerged territory—what the Latins would call Finis Terrae (Land’s End)—to an immersed world, Initium Maris [2] —the beginning of the sea.

Beneath the surface, we enter this “parallel invisible” to fertile lands. From the depths rise coastal forests stretching as far as the eye can see. Kelp sways in the currents, canopies of hymantales bend at the surface, sands meet the seagrass meadows of zostera. Sheer rocky walls appear, speckled with sea urchins, lemon-yellow sponges, and gorgonians, revealed as the light fades. Offshore, the water—bluer, glaz—still retains enough green from the coasts, from fertile sediments and microalgae, that below, the gaze dissolves into color. Here, the landscape is shaped by both the visible and the invisible. In a sublime paradox, the invisible determines the visible; the microscopic becomes landscape, not by magnification, but by accumulation in immensity. Plankton, along with organic and inorganic matter dissolved in the water masses, become color, density, or transparency in panoramic views. Life is everywhere, interacting and shaping the singularity of the underwater space, where the vanishing point of the landscape reaches not toward the horizon, but toward the monochrome.

Color deepens and unifies with depth. In black and white, images then reveal the underside of the islands, a geography of inaccessible landscapes. Shades of gray and black conjure up imaginary expanses from other worlds—worlds we might inhabit, if we did not already. This invisible yet nearby space—sometimes welcoming, sometimes unsettling, often mysterious—is in constant transformation. To preserve its image at a given moment, to show it, to let it exist in its banality, its reality, seems more essential than ever.

Nicolas Floc’h, 2022



[1] During the Ice Age, the ocean was 120 meters lower, and the Ponant islands were part of the mainland.

[2] Initium Maris is an artistic expedition I carried out between Saint-Malo and Saint-Nazaire, along the coasts and islands, from 2018 to 2021.