Christian Michel, Liège-Bamako, 2010. Gare de Liège, Belgique.

The "Christian MICHEL" universe is part of a work on architecture & space for 24 years. Image & constructions and unreal & virtual spaces form assemblies. His journey made photography his focus and a quest for elsewhere in his dreams, the inception and fractal.
Artist-photographer Christian MICHEL composes his work as a builder, intuitively mixing 3 requirements: body, technique and ideal...
Body first. His assemblages provide us immediately a space where it would be possible to enter there, be it travel, home, shelter, in this respect utilitas, and that can be opened on a panorama, a natural landscape, deep inside. His large prints stand as buildings that may contain our personal histories. We are not spectators, we are visitors caressing textures, walls fleeing, according to the grounds of a frieze x times turned, contemplating the electronic dance graphics detailing the balanced repetitions materials. Patchwork fragments rearranged, inverted images take us into a kind of hall of mirrors where we recognize distorted, broken, multiplied elsewheres.
Technique, then, ingenious imperative firmitas. It is orchestrating and stabilizing the surface and perspective. Christian MICHEL selects its materials, quantifies, duplicates, cuts out, shapes, tests the strength, empties and allocates. It creates rhythm with hyphenation and mergers. And we look at the book, curious about the location of the first stone or irresistibly caught in a troubling detail, a well, a ramp, water, sky, and shadows that lengthen and break and suddenly push our eyes. Forced hypnosis, serene, contemplating the work in full.
On the ideal, finally, clean aesthetic conditions of the artist or venustas. A quest. It is to confront the constant attempt of a representation of the formless, to invent a volume that would give it time. Here we enter here the subjective, but the distance seems to rub proximity, loneliness, and war adorn hope, denouncing our virtual area conceding her ascension and reactive powers, the mixer of plastic allows sharing scriptures of light... So qu'ériger a radiant city with the materials of the past and innovation, it would be a full witness to the living, the speed, the ephemeral and the Immensity.
— Clarisse FRONTIN, Author, September 2014
LIÈGE-BAMAKO: Séries Assembly Date de création: 01.2010 – Gare de Liège – Belgique – Tirage original numéroté H 90 x l 75 cm – Séries I
When the little Marcel, long told to get to bed early, delaying the time to go to her room, the magic lantern projected kaleidoscopic images of memory and dreams.
When the great Gurski scans the surface of the earth, the room gives us studded images of figures in cosmic banality.
When Christian Michel weaves craftsmen photographs into computer mechanics, out come crisp, disturbing stories.
His universe of repeating units embedded in the ink prints like moving carpet images, and with material in sight, our eyes and our unconscious are very far from here.
— John-Paul Cassulo, Architect collectioneur, July 2015