In À fleur de mer, Jacques Perconte explores the landscapes of the Alabaster Coast through transformations of video imagery. A reef becomes a field of poppies; green, red, then yellow grass gives way to the ochre shades of the cliffs. Flowers linger as red patches on the rock, like traces of one landscape within another. Through digital compression, forms and colours intermingle, revealing the proximity of the different environments along the Normandy coast. Presented at Rouen railway station during the summer of 2026 as part of Normandie Impressionniste, the video continues a relationship with Normandy’s landscapes spanning almost twenty years.

À fleur de mer

I fell in love with Normandy almost twenty years ago, and ever since, I have kept coming back.

Naturally, my gaze drifted over the incredible greens at the top of the cliffs, along the ridge, and over the flint plunging into the water.

From my earliest years, my heart was nourished by Monet’s millions of hues, already dancing like butterflies with every blink of an eye, letting the lights of my imagination glide through one another.

It is difficult to count how many landscapes I have seen since. And although there are places everywhere that I find wonderful, nowhere else awakens in me the gentle wonder that Normandy does. Because here, I am certain, the light brings to life shades that exist nowhere else.

I never tire of returning, of filming the same landscapes, and from time to time I discover new ones that join the family of my images. I think of the places that move me as beautiful encounters, and with some, I let time weave beautiful friendships.

The cliffs seem strong. They rise more than eighty metres above the waves, with magnificent woods standing proudly upon them. But the rock is chalk, and therefore fragile. One collapse follows another. The brightness of the stone, streaked with flint, gradually slips into the water. The greens and blues painted by the sky become milky, endlessly multiplying the variations in temperature.

If I often turn to cooking as a metaphor, it is also a way of speaking about my technique. It is because we can see the gesture in it. And we can understand that one way of working centres on the quality of the ingredients we use, and on the love we put into preparing them. But it is also a way of speaking about what sharing is meant for. For many people cook to love. I make images to love.

I have been exploring and reinventing the same techniques for more than twenty-five years. Digital technology is not immaterial. I do not work like an engineer, but like a cook. I believe that images, so often cold, are increasingly made to distance us from nature. They should not replace what we destroy. They should not separate us still further from the living world. I wish for them to be otherwise, like a mechanism of resilience, a return to the moment, to our full presence.

Everything your eyes receive here has been filmed. What these images contain is the time that passes before the camera. We follow the light in its oscillations, in its smiles; we see flowers swirling at sea, and the sea rocking with the wind as it glides over the saturated petals. Time is there, at every instant.

À fleur de mer: flowers and wind dance together at the edge of the ridge, sea foam at the foot of the cliffs. Flowers at the sea’s surface, with gentleness and the vigour of a nature we would like to believe we know how to tame. But in its immense beauty, in its infinity, it constantly reminds me of the infinity of our lives and my own finitude.

When we look at nature, when we truly open our eyes and leave the world behind, the first thing to fade is this world of ours. It leaves an open space for our bodies to merge with everything around them. And as long as our minds remain still, we are no longer separate from the rest of things. For that moment, we are alive like the flower, the bee, the tree, the bird. And perhaps even like the planet, the solar system, the universe.