"There are other worlds but they are in this one". Paul Éluard's centenary verse has become such a universal motto that it serves to explain all the parallel dimensions in which we live or to advertise a perfume. The multi-award-winning French photographer Patrick Desgraupes has paraphrased the poet and has shown that there are other galaxies and they are in this one, in the barrels where the best wines in the world are born and drunk in the most prestigious wineries on the world map.
What Bacchus and Dionysus would have given to see its circular images that resemble the eyes of mythological figures, with their veins, branches, flowers and sparkles. With its blood reds, purple valleys and blue mountains. Images so sensational, artisanal and made with so much patience that demonstrate that human bravery and passion are unsurpassed.
The snapshots speak of an initial stage, a wild alchemy, which goes unnoticed, which follows the harvest, continues its path and which becomes a miracle that ferments in silence and with the vintners wondering if the wine will come out as it should. they dream.
“This downpour is a flare,” Éluard also wrote, unknowingly tailored to the work of the photographer Desgraupes. Because the fermented grape looks like a firestorm, a human iris about to burst, a meteor shower, ships on fire beyond Orion like those in Blade Runner. The Moon by Georges Méliès. A black hole blooming, a love germinating, a drunken, crazy, blind love, without a future.
Desgraupes' work, which with effort has been sneaking into the great French 'domaines', speaks for itself, but he limits it because reaching these galaxies that coexist among us has needed a path: “I was tired of a certain photography, of the ancient mechanisms, I was concerned with representing the concept of how the universe is perceived. Transformation, because everything that lives, grows, dies transforms over time. It was that concept that was on my mind. My passion for wine helped me capture that idea.”
The artist had moved from Paris to Provence and knew a few winegrowers. “At first I didn't know what the process was like, but I knew there was something I had to discover, so I became a kind of spy police who monitored the harvest process from harvesting to bottling. It was the perfect landscape to talk about that DNA, that transformation…”
The first glance, his first investigations became landscapes that were as natural as they were esoteric, worthy of material artists who juggled textures, tones, and volumes.
What did you feel when you saw what was happening in the barrel? “At first,” Desgraupes says on the phone, “the first images shocked me, they moved my heart like the first time I heard Mozart, Jimi Hendrix, Peter Gabriel or saw a David Lynch film. It is the idea of transforming art and the path that is followed. For me, photos try to explain stories because we need to feed ourselves with emotions, we need lighthouses in the midst of the storms that we experience every day.”
Cultural references flood the must barrels, acquiring their colors, flavors and nuances. In his spaceship cabin windows, Desgraupes remembers that the writer Aldous Huxley, who had experimented with mescaline, once asked Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors, why they had chosen that name for the group.
“And Morrison told him that the doors were a metaphor for the parallel worlds that existed besides our own, that was what I wanted to achieve.” Doors, windows, secret passages. We must not forget that one of Huxley's works is titled "The doors of perception."
Of course, the vintners, tied to a calendar, tradition and rituals that work like the hands of a clock, did not always understand at first what the photographer wanted to do and how he had done it. 'How can it be?', they asked and when they saw the result they were saddened.
“It is not easy to enter certain ‘domains’ and even more so at that delicate moment that involves the harvest and the first steps to making wine. The little secret is obvious, you have to be invisible or almost.” Among the 'maisons' in which Desgraupes has worked are the most prestigious, a Hall of Fame without discussion.
A small selection: the domaines de la Romanée Conti, des Lambrays-LVMH, Bouchard Père
Desgraupes has created a special and unique wine cosmogony in which to dive, oceans that neither Verne nor Bradbury imagined. Photographs of him could travel into space like Bowie's Space Odyssey or Elton John's Rocket Man or Ludwig Van's 5th Symphony. Oh, by the way, the Desgraupes series is titled, in English, “From Grapes to Mars.”
Éluard closes this small vintner by talking about the need for the absurd in life: “The alteration of logic until reaching the absurd, the use of the absurd until reaching reason.” There is nothing more absurd, beautiful, useful and natural than images, full moons in bloom, botanical gardens where species that were thought to be extinct grow.
