OLIVIER CROUZEL

Vues dégagées sur la Méditerranée

Photographs on chestnut wood slats, 2026

Through photography and video, Olivier Crouzel inserts one landscape into another. Though more accustomed to coastal environments, he nevertheless finds familiar ground at Szilassy Park, an Alpine territory that, 140 million years ago, lay beneath a vast ocean. In Vues dégagées sur la Méditerranée, the artist layers a Mediterranean view over an Alpine panorama, reconnecting the mountains with their distant underwater past.

Each work is positioned directly opposite the Alpine view it overlays, encouraging us to extend our gaze beyond the landscape of Bex to the Mediterranean, while openings cut into the centre of each piece suggest passage through the mountains towards the sea. The placement of the works also corresponds to viewpoints carefully selected by Lady Hope and her daughter Elisabeth during the park’s development in the 19th century. These “picture-postcard” vistas are thus not accidental features of the landscape, but carefully framed views admired time and again since the park’s inception.

The title of the work, which translates as “An unobstructed view of the Mediterranean”, is a reference to a slogan popularised in the 1980s, when Swiss youth took to the streets to demand a more open society in a country hemmed in by mountains. Now, almost 50 years on, Crouzel leaves it to us, as viewers, to decide whether the unobstructed views offered by his works answer those earlier calls.

Olivier Crouzel (MAR, b. 1973*) lives and works in France.