Fabrice Fouillet’s series named “Colosses” captures gigantic statues and monuments that denote religious and political icons. Fouillet seeks to capture in how landscape around each monument has been transformed. In the artist own’s words”:
The series “Colosses” is a study of the landscapes embracing those monumental commemorative statues. Although hugeness is appealing, exhilarating or even fascinating, I was first intrigued by the human need to build gigantic declarations. Then, I asked myself how such works could be connected to their surroundings. How can they fit in the landscapes, despite their excessive dimensions and their fundamental symbolic and traditional functions?
That is why I chose to photograph the statues from a standpoint outside their formal surroundings (touristic or religious), and to favour a more detached view, watching them from the sidelines. This detachment enabled me to offer a wider view of the landscape and to place the monuments in a more contemporary dimension.
Fouillet references a wave of “statuemania” in the 1990s in locations mostly around Asia where many more sculptures are still under construction. The world’s tallest monument, a tribute to the the independence hero Sardar Patel in India, will soon reach a soaring height of 182 meters, nearly twice that of the Statue of Liberty. You can see much more of the series over on his website. All photos courtesy of Fouillet.
