The gossips will tell you that it's because he has no sense of direction that Michaël chose to live on a 24 km² island (but someone with no sense of direction often, by serendipity, possesses a knack for discoveries... as evidenced by the pictures). Philosophers would rather lean towards a fulfilled quest for hedonism. Pragmatists understand that in St Barthélemy (more than elsewhere), you just have to cross the street to find a job. Romantics will think that Love was waiting for him here. Sailors are well aware that the call of the open sea, like that of sirens, is irresistible (and curiously, leaving Paris after a visual communication course wasn't that difficult). Immobile fools believe, as always when someone moves, that he's fleeing... Artists, for their part, imagine he came to capture the unique light of the tropics, the one that shines with the brilliance of mercury. Poets know that the smiling call of its clear expanse and the agitated fires of its dancing mirrors, the sea, dazzling and naked enchantress, awakens great hopes in adolescent hearts. Psychoanalysts, as passionate about the couch as about the deviant, allude, conjecture, bluster, and ramble on about the metaphorical universe of the island and its presence in each being as a closed territory where, like the undertow, fantasies and the (dis)illusions of a lost paradise, the one dreamers fantasize about from a distance, converge, gather, and meet; but Michaël is no distant dreamer, he lives his dreams. Obsessive mathematicians might think that it's because adding the numbers 9, 7, 1, 3, 3 gives the number 23, the ninth in the list of prime numbers, that Michaël made the esoteric choice of this overseas collectivity and not another. The ethnologist, meanwhile, would interpret it rather as an allegory on the myth of the noble savage, and he, to preserve through images what remains authentic on the island. Nostalgics understand, upon discovering his shots, that he is rather searching for a past memory. The silent will say nothing and those who know him are very lucky...

He, however, thinks it's more a series of circumstances that led him to settle here, and today, through this exhibition, the photographer invites us to savor the tender and sweet flesh of this delicious fruit of chance, picked 13 years earlier... Indeed, chance does things well! So, enjoy the tasting...

Sebastien, my brother