In Julian Charrière’s work, the flame echoes global warming, implicitly reflecting the concept of the “megafire”, which is increasingly spawning the phenomenon of the Pyrocene that nothing can stop, like the wild conflagrations that are now consuming our forests during periods of scorching heat in Australia, California, Indonesia, Amazonia, Bolivia, and even in Siberia. Since 2019, the artist has increasingly been using fire as a material or motif. In a similar vein, he explores carbon, petroleum, palm oil, and the sun—in other words, materials used as fuel.

Controlled Burn is a series of drone-captured images, consisting of photographs and one film, depicting coal mines (Open-Pit Mine G.4), disused oil platforms, and cooling towers (Cooling Tower K.7). The result: cosmic images between futurist atmospheres and fossil fuel swelters. It is interesting to note that in the film, edited to play backwards, we see crackling fireworks that contract instead of spreading out. Julian Charrière reduces the explosive, polluting celebration of those fireworks by creating another aesthetic, that of their disappearance.