Toxic

An early body of work made on the Étang de Berre, the lagoon of the artist’s childhood, ringed by the petrochemical industry of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region. Stepping over the barrier and walking away from the showcase beaches, Segard spent several months as what he calls the guardian of this dislocated territory, drawing on the reverse of supports gathered on the way — posters, frames, technical data sheets, account-book covers, already worn by time, soiled by pollution, dried by the wind and bleached by the sun.

From that small inventory of backs a fragmented landscape emerged: empty zones where nature carries the marks of the industry around it, with a human figure introduced for scale, as in the industrial photographs of the nineteen-fifties. The series culminates in Fishing boats that fishermen abandon on the spot and which are treated by life in the open air, fair weather and storms — a twenty-metre frieze apprehended at walking pace, in which the decomposing boats are reflected in a puddle that makes an uncertain waterline between worlds. The artist’s own account of the work is at Toxique.