Jean-Vincent Simonet

Biography
Jean-Vincent Simonet (b. 1991) is a French artist who graduated from ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne in 2014. He lives and works between Paris and Zurich. Working at the intersection of photography, painting, and digital culture, Simonet examines how images are produced, transformed, and circulated. Through repeated printing, chemical alteration, overexposure, mechanical stress, physical contamination, and digital manipulation, he destabilizes the photographic image, creating works that resist any fixed form. His work has been exhibited at Centre de la Photographie Genève, Fotomuseum Winterthur, FOAM in Amsterdam, CentroCentro in Madrid, and Reiffers Art Center in Paris, among others. Publishing is central to his practice, with recent books including Osaka (LV Fashion Eye, 2025) and Kitengela (Mousse Publishing, 2024). He has been a lecturer at ECAL since 2019.

Residency project
At La Becque, Jean-Vincent Simonet will explore the tension between the myth of nature and its constructed reality. He will photograph environments that appear natural yet are deeply altered by human intervention, from the forests of his childhood to the Lake Geneva basin. These images will then be transformed through unstable printing processes that destabilize the photographic surface. The project engages with the legacy of early twentieth-century pictorialism while drawing on the post-exotic literature of Antoine Volodine, whose writings imagine landscapes where human perspectives recede in favour of vegetal and ecological forms of existence, opening other ways of inhabiting the world.