France • Born in 1968

Alien Love

A former artistic director in marketing, Sacha Goldberger changed careers when he went back to school to study photography at Gobelins in 2008. Since then, he has created long, ambitious photo series which involve the use of logistical and technical resources worthy of a cinema production. For one of his recent works, a metaphor for an earth ravaged by its inhabitants gone in search of a planet to save them, reflected in the work Alien Love, he invited writer and director Alexandre Jardin to write an introduction that summarises the artist’s silliness:

“Normal people scare me. They tolerate reality. Sacha Goldberger’s nonsense soothes me. It challenges reality’s right to have the last word. Sacha appears to be a photographer. In reality, he is against taking the poetry out of life. Against every form of treacherous limitation. Against dull-mindedness. Against a lack of freedom in visual vocabulary. This creates hallucinatory photographs with a core of reality, the smell of real motels, the nonchalance of real aliens getting tipsy. [...] Why do I find this touching? Because I’m suffocating in an excess of reality. Like you, I’m sure, I’m struggling in a world that stubbornly refuses to add in enough poetry to make the air breathable.

When an athlete of beauty bends over backwards to erase the idiotic border between dreams and reality, I want to give him a kiss. When he sacks off the dreariness of reality to get in bed with dreams, I feel that Goldberger is a humanitarian, one of those men who soothe poor human souls imprisoned in dullness. His light also whispers that we don’t have to put up with the light in the metro, the corner store or your mother-in-law’s neon-splattered interior. We have the right to bask in its wondrous beauty, to wander in the radiant nostalgia of the fifties. Voilà, I said it. This born rebel is right to laugh so beautifully, to escape the bland and tasteless, to take Roswell seriously! Screw normal people, screw the followers!”

LE GRAND CHÊNE

Printed exhibition thanks to the support and expertise of the PICTO laboratory

Thanks to the Galerie XII in Paris.