The reading of reality by the viewer is the main subject of the work of Etienne Rey. Through his installations and sculptures, he distorts what seemed to be the basis for understanding a given context. In his work, it is above all a question of perception, of point of view and of a form of sensory experience. Light, whether natural and reflected on filtering and diffracting materials, or artificial, playing with darkness and mist, is an essential vector of this transfiguration. Écran [screen], trame [frame], flou [blur], turbulence, vortex or réflection [reflection] are some of the items of his visual vocabulary, they are the tools of this destructuring of the reality.
The work is perceptual, it is approached without any particular knowledge, in a search for universality. Each of his installations explores a phenomenological experience, and deploys spaces, sometimes unstable, where everything evolves permanently according to the environment, the light, the position of the viewer, her/his point of view, her/his movements. The mixture between the reflections and the matter plunge us into an optical and sensory disorder.
Each work could be defined as a mirror which would allow us to renew our glance. Endowed with these incessant changes of perception, the statement of Etienne Rey evokes the dangers of a thought which would be built by ignoring the doubt.
