Raphaëlle Peria's practice brings together photography, engraving and sculpture. Working from photography as a point of departure, she has developed a distinctive subtractive technique that transforms photography into a sculptural medium. Using engraving and surgical tools, she meticulously scratches, carves and erases the printed surface, lifting the coloured layer to reveal the white support beneath. "White is the colour of oblivion; the things I erase are those I have forgotten", she says.
The act of scratching the photographic surface is not destructive but revelatory: light, texture and relief emerge from the image itself. Hidden forms and latent presences gradually emerge, creating hauntingly poetic images suspended between absence and presence, disappearance and persistence. Like a sculptor, by removing the unneccessary, Peria actually adds meaning.
Landscapes, trees and fragile ecosystems occupy a central place in Peria's work. Rather than simply documenting nature, she transforms it into a tactile and poetic space where ecological fragility becomes visible. Her delicate works reveal both the beauty and vulnerability of the plant world, reflecting on the traces left by environmental change and the passage of time.
These concerns find a new expression in her recent project, Crossing the Missing Fragment, presented at Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2025 after receiving the BMW Art Makers Prize alongside curator Fanny Robin. The project originates from a family photo album documenting a barge journey along the Canal du Midi that Peria made with her father and sisters at the age of three. Rediscovering these forgotten images, she retraces the journey through both archival and newly made photographs, weaving together personal memory and the changing landscape. Once lined with plane trees, the canal now bears the scars of a fungal disease that has profoundly transformed its ecosystem. Through her process of scraping and erasure, Peria memorializes these disappearing landscapes, crystallizing the fragile traces of memory, absence and environmental loss.
Raphaëlle Peria graduated from the École Européenne Supérieure d'Art de Bretagne in 2014. A finalist for the Emerige Revelations Grant in 2015, she presented her first solo exhibition, Marinus Asiaticus, at Galerie Papillon in Paris in 2017. Her work has since been exhibited internationally, including at the Bullukian Foundation in Lyon, Frac Picardie, Domaine Pommery, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Vannes, the Sungkok Art Museum in Seoul and the French Institute in Madrid. In 2025, she was awarded the BMW Art Makers Prize alongside curator Fanny Robin. Her works are held in numerous public and private collections, including the Mobilier National, the Neuflize OBC Foundation and the Thalie Foundation.