Paradise - Maxime Riché
Hangar Gallery is glad to invite Maxime Riché for a solo show with his series Paradise.
On November 8, 2018, the Camp Fire megafire destroyed Paradise, a town in California (USA), in less than four hours. Caused by a short circuit on an electrical pylon, it spread quickly due to strong winds, heat, and dry vegetation. Camp Fire remains the deadliest fire in the United States, claiming the lives of 86 people and destroying 18,800 buildings. On July 13, 2021, another megafire, the Dixie Fire, started near Paradise, although the winds pushed it away from the town this time. This fire, the largest in California's history, burned 390,000 hectares over more than 100 days.
Maxime Riché traveled to Paradise in 2020 and again in 2021 to meet those who decided to rebuild their "paradise" in a place that now seems deeply inhospitable. To sensitively capture the emotions of the survivors and the images that haunt them, he used analog photography, intermittently employing infrared slide film. Its fiery tones, flashbacks of the hell they lived through, evoke the flames etched in their memory.
Navigating the boundaries between documentary and fiction, the Paradise series serves as a parable about our capacity for adaptation. It offers a glimpse into the next place that will have to undergo this slow healing process after disasters whose causes are increasingly human. It suggests our growing separation from nature, our hubris in trying to defy it at all costs.
