lucien.bitaux(at)gmail.com
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Lucien Bitaux is an artist and holds a PhD in the arts. In 2025, he defended his thesis on the ‘mineral condition’ of the photographic image, which he wrote at Le Fresnoy – National Studio for Contemporary Arts (Tourcoing) and the Centre for Contemporary Arts Studies at the University of Lille. This research resulted in the exhibition *Soleils mineurs* at the Hauts-de-France Regional Centre for Photography (Douchy-les-Mines) in 2025–2026. Graduated from the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs de Paris (ENSAD) in 2018 and from Le Fresnoy in 2022, the artist constructs his own scientific-looking devices for capturing and displaying images. He has undertaken several residencies, notably with the European STARTS programme and Kikk (Namur, Belgium), with the Ateliers Médicis in 2020, and in Chile in 2023 with the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
His work has been featured in solo exhibitions, notably at the ADAGP (Paris) in 2023 and at the Vasarely Foundation in 2025 (Aix-en-Provence). He has also taken part in group exhibitions, such as at La Villette (Paris) in 2019, at Le Fresnoy (Tourcoing) in 2020 and 2022, at the Espace multimédia Gantner (Burgundy), the Ososphère (Strasbourg) and the Chroniques Biennale (Aix-en-Provence) in 2022. Following the latter, he was awarded the Vasarely Foundation/Chroniques Prize in 2023. Winner of the ADAGP’s 2022 Digital Art – Video Art Revelation Prize (Paris), he went on to take part in the Artes Mediales Biennial (Santiago, Chile) in 2023 and held exhibitions at Atelier W (Pantin) in 2023, at the Kunstenlab (Deventer, Netherlands) and at the La Fabrique du Regard festival at Le Bal (Paris) in 2025.
The mineral image
— between art and astronomy,the remanence of rocks
in visualisations and their imagers
The mineral condition of images, called minerality here, outlines an iconographic field common to photographic experiments in art and astronomical visualisations. Both in the patterns proposed by these representations and in their production process, the mineral appears and operates. Minerality invokes dialogues of scale
(celestial object/image of the celestial object), form (concrete substance/abstract figure) and material (photograph of a mine/sensor made of crystals). These interactions occur between the objects we seek to see, the devices that record them, and their resulting images.
Silicon photosensitive sensors, lunar craters, glass lenses, granularity of the image, silver telescope mirrors... inorganic elements enable the invisible to be converted and translated for the human eye. Stones also became new subjects of representation when photography first appeared, closing the loop between the material of the technical object and its visual production. Through a number of case studies from the fields of art and astronomy, the thesis offers a very concrete analysis of mineral forms (Images of Mineralities) before exploring the tangible components that make these visibilities possible (Mineralities of Images). The symmetry of the whole constructs a photographic palindrome.
The aim is therefore to measure how minerality fits into contemporary astronomical imagery and photographic experiments as a visual, material, semantic and even genetic node. To this purpose, the study perpetuates the mirror effect as a method and draws on two approaches: one based on words and the other on forms. It takes the form of a theoretical text approached through the prism of the plasticity of language and an exhibition of the artistic proposals developed for this reflection.
The historical focus on light in writings and practices surrounding photography seems to mask the materiality of images. The omission of minerals in the study of visualisations raises questions about collective perception and understanding of the forms produced by our technological devices. By considering the link between images, their image makers, and their terrestrial or extraterrestrial environment, the thesis questions the abstract concreteness of contemporary imagery. A return to the physicality of captured images — especially when they transcribe the traces of Arts and sciences Arts and sciences imperceptible phenomena — is essential to understanding a world that is more and more perceived through its representations.
The number of photographs produced by humanity may soon exceed the number of stones on Earth. The irreversible conversion of a geological environment into images of that same world reveals all the complexity, paradoxes and implications of technical visual production. Minerality is not a neutral property; it leads us to replace the image in the sphere of material objects.
Thesis introduction in French