Over the course of the seasons, Matthieu Litt wandered through the Ry-Ponet park, a verdant valley in the Liège region known for its rich biodiversity and scenic beauty. Both natural and fragile, this landscape is under increasing threat, targeted by urban expansion and property development. In his poetic series Oasis, Litt chooses not to document the site in a literal way, but rather to blur its contours—transforming it into a space of visual escape and quiet resistance.
Oasis offers more than a portrait of a specific location. It opens a space for projection and reverie, where imagination takes root beyond the boundaries of geographic precision. At its heart, the series raises broader questions about how we relate to land—how we preserve green spaces, or fail to. Litt is less concerned with defining a subject than with cultivating a felt experience. The images he offers do not describe; they suggest. They hold a certain ambiguity, a softness that resists finality.
This sense of openness extends to the material form of the book itself. Printed on delicate, uncoated paper, each image appears softly held—its surface absorbing light rather than reflecting it, muting contrast, and inviting close attention. A quiet rhythm emerges as one turns the pages. Through the paper’s slight transparency, the next image begins to shimmer faintly beneath the surface—never fully visible, just enough to hint at its presence. This partial reveal mirrors the experience of wandering through a landscape like Ry-Ponet: seeing fragments, edges, traces of what lies ahead, but never the whole. It creates a layered reading, where perception unfolds gradually, where looking becomes a form of listening.
In this way, Oasis becomes both a meditation on place and a tactile experience of slowness. Through a kind of sensitive cartography—mapping not only terrain, but emotion, rhythm, and light—Litt gently renews our sense of belonging to the living world. The book’s form encourages us to pay attention, to hold the unremarkable with care. In a time of increasing disappearance—of landscapes, of meaning, of time itself—Oasis reminds us that even the most tenuous traces are worth preserving. What we glimpse through the paper is not only the next image, but the fragility of what might soon be lost.
