An exceptional journey through life

Bastien Soleil's work is unparalleled.

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The origins of his artistic project are to be found in an invisible space that the eye cannot perceive, and which only photography reveals. Just as with an iceberg, Soleil's work comprises both an imperceptible dimension — the physical and technical performance — and a visible part, magnified and exposed to public view, which is the resulting photographs.

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These pictures, however, cannot be reduced to beautifully created images. To limit Soleil's work to photography alone would be to miss the point. Photography is not the work in itself: it is the visible manifestation of a multifaceted experience in which the artist's mastery of freediving technique, the dancers' physical expression, and the viewer's emotion all come together.

 

Soleil trains dancers with no prior experience of diving. He introduces them to freediving in order to guide them towards an extraordinary space and perception, and to depths of up to 20 metres. Holding one's breath then becomes a state of absolute presence. Freed from gravity, the body enters into a profoundly altered relationship with time and space.

 

Water becomes a creative medium.

 

The process begins on dry land, where the choreography is rehearsed extremely rigorously. Every movement, every angle, every distance is meticulously thought out and planned to be carried out in a liquid world where the air has vanished. A team of assistants and safety divers gathers around the artist.

 

They all converge on the cenotes of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula — geological wells sacred to the Maya, chosen for the crystalline purity of the water and the way sunlight penetrates them like a living substance.

 

Underwater and under pressure, everything shifts.

 

Holding their breath, the dancers perform repeated sequences, suspended between control and abandon, danger and silence. The bodies become living sculptures, transformed by the light. Time dilates as the choreography unfolds in a state of extreme concentration, in which every second becomes essential, vital.

 

This invisible aspect of the work draws on a range of expertise: drawing, a matrix of visions; sculpture, the materialisation of the third dimension; choreography, the materialisation of life; the mastery and teaching of freediving; team leadership; and the choice of unique locations around the world.

 

The artist's eye was trained over many years of travel, particularly through spiritual Asia — from temple to temple — centred on one fundamental question: How can I be happy?

 

Meditation and the study of the teachings of Buddha, Christ, Indian spiritual masters and the Greek philosophers led him to his inner temple. It is in this darkness that he charts a path out of doubt, towards the light and towards a form of awakening.

His intimate relationship with the aquatic world reveals to him the observation of the sun's rays penetrating the water and reveals the body's movements in weightlessness. Water, light: Soleil anchors his art in these fundamental elements and in the way they reveal the body.

 

His work also forms part of an aesthetic lineage within art history — notably the Renaissance and the evocative power of the Italian Baroque — with Caravaggio-inspired chiaroscuro continuing to resonate in his underwater compositions.

 

Soleil thus pursues a singular aim: to convey, through beauty and rigour, the truths revealed along his own path.

 

To understand his work is to engage with this unique and profoundly human story — a demanding quest, marked by learning and hardship, and directed towards a goal that is both simple and universal: self-realisation.

 

The artist draws upon his personal history to create art of great symbolic and emotional power. Soleil engages with his audience to bear witness to his journey of initiation. His works, now technically highly accomplished, are steeped in meaning and freedom, fed by mythology, imbued with the mystery of the underwater world, and marked by an aesthetic, sensory and emotional sensitivity of rare intensity.