Streets and faces, city outskirts downgraded by car culture, gatherings of friends or families, places for walking: here, in France or elsewhere, far away in China or closer to home in Israel, Marie-Noëlle Boutin manages to build a realistic representation without resorting to the aggressive signs of a contemporary world so often caricatured. This work lifts forms and signs through defamiliarisation, an observation of the world that reveals what proximity and habit conceal, private situations stripped of anecdote yet sculpted by light celebrating their vitality, a careful consecration of spaces repressed by the imagery of communication, an attention to the quiet of beings through which Boutin describes a fragile state of peace.