THE FREEDOM TO CREATE

The Freedom to Create began with a chance encounter over a lasagna in a Paris café.

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I was sitting alone when I met Gauthier Schoonover, an artist whose career had taken him through the worlds of beauty, fashion and luxury before leading him somewhere entirely different: a secluded creative life in the French countryside.

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We immediately connected over our shared fascination with art, fashion and the ways in which images can shape how we see the world. Despite coming from different generations and backgrounds, we found an unexpected number of parallels in the way we think about creativity.

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Gauthier’s own practice revolves around an unusual material: magazines. He folds, transforms and reconstructs them into sculptures that are deliberately ephemeral. When I asked him about their impermanence, he described them as existing “pour un instant seulement” — for a moment only.

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The phrase stayed with me.

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Much of the art we encounter is built around permanence. Paintings hang in museums for centuries; sculptures are preserved, collected and protected. Knowing that something will remain gives us the luxury of assuming we can return to it later.

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Gauthier’s work asks for something different. Because it will disappear, you have to look now. You become more attentive. You notice the object, the gesture, the moment — precisely because it will not be there forever.

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That idea became the starting point for my photographs.

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What began as a portrait of an artist became an exploration of his entire creative environment: his sculptures, his body, his home, the hidden château, the garden, and the swimming pool he describes as his soul space. I became interested not in documenting his work, but in observing the relationship between the artist, the things he creates and the world he has built around them.

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The photographs move between colour and black & white, portrait and environment, intimacy and distance. Together they form a cinematic portrait of a life organised around the freedom to create — and a reminder that sometimes the things that cannot last are precisely the things that demand our presence.