this seriesBillboards
In the vast desert landscapes surrounding Dubai, abandoned billboards stand like silent monuments to a vanished purpose. Once designed to attract attention, to announce, to persuade, these structures have gradually lost their voices. Their messages have disappeared.
Their function has faded. What remains is the material itself: weathered wood, fractured surfaces, faded pigments and the marks left by years of exposure to sun, drought, wind and sand. Antoine Gaussin turns his gaze towards these forgotten structures and transforms them into fragments of contemporary archaeology.
The billboard becomes a contemporary vanitas — a reflection on the impermanence of human constructions and the persistence of the elements. The desert does not destroy all at once, it slowly transforms. In Billboards, time becomes a material.
The works move between abstraction and hyper-figuration. Seen from a distance, they appear almost abstract: planes of ochre, gold, white and burnt earth intersect with organic textures and graphic structures. Then the eye moves closer.
Cracks appear. Fibres emerge. Grains of sand become visible.
The surface reveals itself as a landscape in its own right. This is where Gaussin’s Hyper-photography becomes essential. Each work is constructed from multiple high-definition photographs assembled into a single image.
The technique allows the smallest details to coexist with the monumental scale of the scene, creating an experience in which the image seems at once distant and intimately close. The original meaning disappears.
The photograph becomes almost tactile and the viewer moves between two perceptions: the billboard as an object, and the billboard as matter.
Matter remains. And around it, the desert continues its slow movement. In Billboards, Antoine Gaussin captures the moment when human ambition becomes landscape. What remains is not the message the billboard once carried, but the trace left by its disappearance.