Jean-Vincent Simonet

The Osaka (2025) series, commissioned by Louis Vuitton for its Fashion Eye collection, is part of the “Japan season” linked to the Osaka Kansai 2025 World Expo. The works are presented in the immersive exhibition “Visionary Journeys” (July 15-September 17, 2025) at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art. Jean-Vincent Simonet offers an intuitive portrait of the city. Suspended between two eras, Osaka blends futuristic dreams with a chaotic present. Raw and electric, it reveals itself in ruined arcades, flickering neon lights, labyrinthine alleys, and retro-futuristic structures. The artist focuses less on monuments than on traces of everyday life: an overabundance of advertising, repeated logos, proliferating screens, signs of a landscape shaped by consumption where urban identity merges with capitalism. The city becomes a changing mental landscape, his photographs capturing the rhythm and sensory overload of hypermodern life.
This saturated and fragmented aesthetic illustrates Simonet's artistic statement: to transform photography into raw material shaped into a unique work. Trained at ECAL, he divides his time between Zurich, Bourgoin-Jallieu, and Paris, where his studio is located next to the Defrise agency, which specializes in set design. While this agency recreates reality, Simonet distorts it, exploring “fake” in all its forms and the synthetic colors of the 1960s: Japanese neon lights, decorative flowers, peach flies...
His experimental technique alters the colors and textures of photography using machines from his family's factory. He describes this process as a “reverse darkroom.” The wet ink is rinsed and rubbed like a painter would, with certain layers removed to create a visual X-ray. The final surface, sometimes dried in the open air, makes each print unique, reinventing photography and distancing it from any faithful or reproducible representation of reality.