Bastien Soleil
“Simplicity is complexity resolved.”
Constantin Brancusi
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The art of Bastien Soleil has no equivalent, neither on land nor beneath the sea.
It is born in an invisible space, where the eye cannot reach, and of which photography is only the trace.
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The visible part of his work takes shape as images displayed on walls. Yet to reduce his practice to photography would be to miss what is essential. Photography is not the artwork: it is the link, the fragile point of contact between an experience lived underwater and us, terrestrial spectators.
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His art unfolds in depth, between three and twenty meters below the surface. There, Bastien Soleil trains dancers with no aquatic experience to perform freediving. Holding one’s breath becomes a state of absolute presence. The body, freed from gravity, enters into a different relationship with time, space, and itself.
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The process begins on dry land. The choreographies he creates are rehearsed there extensively, with millimetric precision. Every gesture, every orientation, every distance is conceived for a world where air disappears. Then, accompanied by a team of assistants and safety divers, the group travels to the cenotes of Mexico—timeless places where the clarity of the water and the passage of sunlight have no equal on Earth.
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Underwater, everything shifts. In apnea, the dancers bring to life visions constructed beforehand, suspended between mastery and surrender, danger and silence. Bodies become living sculptures, pierced by light. Time stretches. The choreography unfolds in a state of extreme concentration, where every second counts.
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This invisible work weaves together drawing, the matrix of the visions, freediving instruction, choreography, sculpture, and the exploration of unique locations around the world. Its genesis is made possible only through the mastery of a rare set of disciplines, all placed in the service of an inner vision.
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That vision is rooted in a deeply spiritual journey. Years earlier, Bastien Soleil traveled across Asia from temple to temple, driven by a question as simple as it was essential:
“How can I be happy?”
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Meditation, the study of the teachings of the Buddha, of Christ, and of Greek philosophers led him into an inner descent. He plunged into the depths of his own history, his suffering, and his conditioning. In that darkness, he found a path toward the light and began a work of liberation.
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Ordo ab Chao: from chaos, light is born.
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In the same way, he perceived in the relationship between water, light, and the body the ultimate symbolic representation of this inner work. His art was born from this realization.
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Inspired by the grace of the Renaissance and the power of Italian Baroque, particularly the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, Bastien Soleil pursues a single intention: to transmit, through beauty and rigor, the truths he encountered along his own spiritual path.
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To begin to understand his work, one must look to this singular, compelling, and profoundly human story, a quest for which he sacrificed everything in order to reach something simple and universal: to be happy.
