When Pino Musi began a photographic series in Côtes-d’Armor in April 2016, this geographical area was terra incognita for him. At the invitation of the GwinZegal Art Center, the Italian photographer, based in Paris, would find the opportunity to lead a long-term campaign lasting several months for the first time in his career. […] Placing architecture at the heart of his practice, Pino Musi initially focused his interest on the structure of agricultural buildings and farmhouses, which punctuate the bocage landscape of a countryside focused mainly on livestock and dairy production. Such attention to the spaces a priori without qualities of a precarious rural society, remote inland, far from large urban centers, distinguishes this project from previous cases which focused primarily on the more touristy coastal areas of the region, like Suzanne Lafont as part of the DATAR Photographic Mission, or Thibaut Cuisset, commissioned between 1994 and 1998 in the Côtes-d’Armor by the Landscape Photographic Observatory. The exploration campaign, carried out over a vast expanse of central Brittany crisscrossed by car, quickly revealed a certain equivalence between the building typology of traditional farms and that of the soulless constructions of peri-urban housing estates. […] This route begins with makeshift shelters along the roads, followed by hangars and agricultural operations, it then passes by imposing buildings of the agri-food industry, lingers in towns in the process of desertification, before ending in the residential areas linked to the phenomenon of reurbanization. The photographer describes here, with precision and without emphasis, a fragile and paradoxical countryside, whose ancestral and immutable character is opposed to accelerated mutation. His images in gray tones devoid of contrast, void of any human presence, reflect the monotony and suspended atmosphere of the place, which is reinforced by the absence of temporal clues, with the exception of rare automobiles. Recorded using a digital camera and without systematic use of a tripod to gain spontaneity, the resulting photographs nonetheless display the attributes of camera work, a usual tool in the landscaper's panoply: assertive geometrization, balance of composition and stylistic neutrality coupled with great descriptive quality. The question of point of view also proves to be decisive, as the operator must choose the right distance to clearly define the spatial relationships between the different elements. Because it is indeed a game of formal order that Pino Musi dedicates himself to, he who was nourished by minimalist aesthetics and who is eager to find in reality the equivalent of the plastic forms of geometric abstraction. A certain number of his images emphasize the tangle of successive constructions, while others isolate the monumentality of the frontal views which block the horizon of the landscape. […] While his neutral and balanced recording of blind facades inevitably evokes the memory of Walker Evans, it is the ancestry of the work of Lewis Baltz which seems to shape his approach even more. Looking at this corpus of images, we can see how photography and architecture are linked by an unwavering spirit of complicity. Indeed, the two disciplines have in common an acute awareness of space, light and matter. Both submit above all an arrangement of shapes, volumes, reliefs, solids and voids. […] In a subtle balance between objectivity and sensitivity, Pino Musi’s art is characterized by a documentary vision augmented by experimentation with form. Driven by this desire to objectify the landscape, not devoid of considerations on the socio-cultural and environmental context of the site invested, he manages to reclassify these places as landscapes, to restore dignity to the humble reality of this rural world. Excerpt from the text Photographic campaign by Alexandre Quelle, TEXT: ALEXANDRE QUOI DESIGN: CLAIRE SCHVARTZ Limited editions: Forty head copies have been taken from this work, accompanied by an original print numbered and signed by the author.