Ordinary angels exist. Etienne Renzo has seen them and photographed them. His angels are both feminine and masculine, earthly and heavenly. They inhabit a rarely seen photograph that is well worth discovering.

Etienne Renzo has been a photographer with heart and soul since the mid-1970s. He has developed a unique practice while also working as a professional photographer, farmer, pilot, mechanic and business manager. He has also been a foundryman and local elected official.

This unusual career path has enabled him to develop a style of photography of true technical and aesthetic quality, both in film and digital, particularly in portraiture. His photography touches on the very essence of bodies and souls, particularly with nudes in nature, where humans merge with non-human animals, minerals and plants.

Etienne Renzo is also interested in muses, nature spirits and people's auras. This is how he became a photographer of the visible and invisible dual nature of things. The invisible too, because his career has unfolded in relative artistic isolation. This has allowed him to create a unique, sincere and native poetics in contact with the earth, animals and the air. This is evidenced by the two series of images of shepherdesses and angels, which he has chosen to present together.

The photographs of bodies immersed in a natural environment and of naked shepherdesses accompanying their flocks of sheep or pigs originate from agricultural and rural experiences. Captured in their simplest form, like their naked and hairy animals, the shepherdesses are on an equal footing with their flocks. These images have something bucolic and mythical about them, but also something ecological and erotic in their femininity. For Etienne Renzo, shepherdesses are also "to be seen as muses and intermediaries with the invisible realm of mythology, through their closeness to their animals".

In the photographer's career, as in his exhibition, the shepherdesses prepare the ground for angels. But Etienne Renzo's angels, captured in levitation, are very real and fly lower than those of Wim Wenders. They are also portraits of humans who, above all else, sanctify "good people". Or righteous souls. Ordinary angels, in a way.

Through these two series of portraits that bridge the earthly and the heavenly, Etienne Renzo's photography proves to be particularly emblematic of the challenges of reconnecting with nature and humanity, which civilisation must address without further delay. This is why it has its rightful place in the current landscape of imagery as a means of connecting with the profound nature of things, bodies and souls.

Pascal Pique, The Museum of the Invisible