Following a debut at les Rencontres d’Arles this summer, and presentations at the Voiles de Saint-Tropez and Art Basel Paris, Mustapha Azeroual and Marjolaine Lévy are exhibiting an adapted version of their photographic project The Green Ray at Paris Photo, which returns to the Grand Palais from November 7th to 10th, 2024.

The Green Ray at Paris Photo, which returns to the Grand Palais from November 7th to 10th, 2024. Azeroual and Lévy are winners of the third edition of BMW ART MAKERS, an artistic patronage programme which invites artist-curator partnerships to propose concepts for experimental visual arts projects, giving the winning duo carte blanche to realise their intellectual concepts. Azeroual and Lévy follow in the footsteps of 2022 winners Arash Hanaei and Morad Montazami, and 2023 winners Eva Nielsen and Marianne Derrien.

I met with Azeroual and Lévy at Paris Photo as they revealed the most recent incarnation of The Green Ray project with BMW Art Makers. The duo has a great relationship, often finishing each other’s sentences and are obviously on the same wavelength.

Franco-Moroccan photographer Azeroual has a background in science and studied mechanical engineering, later turning his attention to exploring the colour of light through experimental abstract photography. French curator and historian Lévy is an expert on narrative socialised abstraction, and she wrote a thesis on the return of the avant-gardes in contemporary art, a theoretical and philosophical interest shared by Azeroual’s. So when Azeroual and Lévy met over ten years ago in Morocco, they bonded over a common love of abstraction, science and nature, and the seed for The Green Ray photographic project was sown.

Lévy explains: “First it’s important to know that we met a long time ago, in Casablanca, so we knew each other very well before. And it’s so important to create the project for BMW Art Makers because we talk every day, and we work together every day. We won in January and we actually created a new project in Arles for the festival of photography in June, so we only had three or four months to propose and figure out the project.”

Azeroual: “I worked with lenticular for 10 years, but only in small format. My work is about creating an experience of perception, so being able to develop something wider and bigger has been made possible by winning BMW Art Makers.”

I ask the duo how they began to develop The Green Ray project initially. Lévy: “In 2023, Mustapha and I won an ADAGP grant to write a critical review. The fluidity of our discussions and our shared interests made us want to organise an exhibition. Then, we applied to the BMW ART MAKERS programme. And so The Green Ray was born.”

Azeroual: “The project itself is an extension of Radiance, a study of the colour of light begun ten years ago. Each territory is affected by a light that is specific to human activity, a phenomenon known from meteorology. Different particles are suspended in the atmosphere and, depending on their composition, they change the colour of the sky at sunrise and sunset. Marjolaine has given this project a new twist by integrating it into a very contemporary setting.”

Although the resulting lenticular images on display at Paris Photo are visually abstract, they are intrinsically linked to our presence on earth. These abstract images, as rich and varied as they are, subtly denounce human overactivity, insofar as the color of the skies and the oceans are affected by the polluting activities of people.

There have been literary attempts to capture the enigma of the Green Ray, such as Jules Verne’s 1882 novel ‘Le Rayon Vert’, which follows fictional characters Samuel and Sebastian Melville and their niece Helena Campbell as they set out on a mission to experience the Green Ray, or ‘Green Flash’ on a sea voyage to the Hebrides. The elusive Green Ray is a rare natural phenomenon visible at sea only at certain latitudes, when the rays of the setting or rising sun skim the surface of the water, producing a fleeting emerald-green flash on the horizon.

Surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp attempted to explain the phenomenon in ‘Study for “Le Rayon Vert” (The Green Ray)’, which was exhibited at the 1947 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme. Man Ray’s installation invited visitors to view a photograph illustrating the “green-ray-effect” through a peephole. So it seems fitting that Azeroual and Lévy are exploring ‘The Green Ray’ during the centenary of Surrealism, through their series of immersive lenticular works at Paris Photo. Lévy cites a quotation from art historian Alexander Alberro, who says that the more works involve the viewer’s nervous system, the more egalitarian they are, as an inspiration for the project.

Azeroual and Lévy have expanded on their original presentation of The Green Ray in Arles with a new triptych and new circular lenticulars suspended from the ceiling at Paris Photo. What better location than the Cité de lumière could there be for The Green Ray? I asked the duo if their presentation at Paris Photo is affected by the light coming through the vast domed ceiling of the Grand Palais?

Azeroual: “Yes, it’s artwork that’s moving and activated by the eyes. So the quality of light in the place where you see the artworks completely changes the experience you have with it.”

For The Green Ray project, the artist and curator entrusted sailors with the mission of recording the color of the sky at sunrise and sunset on the high seas. From these images, Azeroual selected the most relevant colors to produce abstractions.

The lenticular prints are abstracted images of sunrises and sunset photos captured by sailors in the Antarctic, Caribbean, Celtic Sea, Greenland, Mediterrean, Red Sea and Timor Sea. For the version of The Green Ray created for voiles des Saint Tropez, the duo collaborated with award-winning French Yachtsman Loïck Peyron, winner of the Jules Verne Trophy and a personal hero of Azeroual’s. Peyron was sailing this summer in the Mediterranean in Greece, and Azeroual made a new artwork for Paris Photo from his pictures.

Azeroual: “’The Green Ray’ started with two big triptychs and we had the possibility to do another artwork. When I met Loick Peyron, it was a crush! He asked if I wanted him to take some pictures for the project.”

With The Green Ray, Azeroual and Lévy have created a series of mesmerising images that manage to see what the eye cannot grasp.

The Green Ray consists of a series of lenticular panopticons that abstract the experience of being at sea, on the edge of an infinite horizon, veering between sunrise and sunset.

Lévy: “For BMW Art Makers we asked Sailors to take pictures of sunrise and sunset at sea in March and April. From these sources, Mustapha picked up the pigments and pixels from the sailors’ photos to create the abstract landscapes. I love the way that Mustaphah thinks about photography. For me he’s not a photographer, he’s more like a painter using pixels like a painter uses a palette of paints.”

Azeroual and Lévy didn’t join the sailing trips, partly because Lévy suffers from seasickness, partly because of the short lead time for the project, and because the carbon footprint involved if they had travelled around the world to capture the images with the sailors, would have contradicted their environmentally aware objectives.

They had ambitions to travel all over the world to capture the images, but in the end, they reached out to a global network of sailors, and the result was a huge collection of sunset and sunrise photos by sailors around the world.

Lévy: “We started to think that we would do the photos in the Indian seas and the Japanese seas, but we realised we didn’t have enough time to travel round the world to do it and that it wasn’t every environmentally friendly to do that! So we asked sailors in different locations to take simple pictures.”

Personally I have never seen abstracted lenticulars, they are usually more figurative. There appears to be a progression of the art of photography through the work they are doing, because they are capturing time as well as capturing the destruction of pollution and capturing nature. I asked Azeroual and Lévy if they have invented a new form of abstraction.

Lévy: “Yes. It’s a narrative abstraction. We tell a story about the pollution of the seas. The amazing colours of the skies are amazing because of particles of pollution in the atmosphere. The singularity of Mustapha’s work is abstraction, but a narrative abstraction. It’s like a paradoxical situation–it’s beauty but it’s also the degradation of the world. It’s all about the history of abstraction. You can be political with abstraction. You can deliver a message without figuration, just with abstraction. And I think this tension is very interesting in Mustapha’s work.”

The large-scale panels and circular works all feature a palette of colours ranging from pinks and blues to equally vibrant yellows and greens, created from photographs taken by sailors crossing oceans. This deceptively beautiful abstraction suggests the influence of climatic phenomena and human activities that affect the nuances of skies and seas.

With The Green Ray Azeroual and Lévy are pushing the boundaries of possibility in photography and creating an immersive experience that captures the beauty of nature, with a subtle underlying message that we need to slow down and stop destroying our planet.

Azeroual: “For me I’m really interested in the photographic processes. And how every process in photography is bringing a different representation of the world. This is really what interested me in photography, the ability to create its own phenomenon.”

Mustapha Azeroual and Marjolaine Lévy ‘The Green Ray’ presented by BMW Art Makers is on display at Paris Photo until 10th November, 2024.