Palm trees, freeways stretching out of sight, neon signs, the sea you sense before you even see it, we all know California, even those who have never set foot there. Cinema, photography, literature told it to us, decades of pop culture that turned it into a mental landscape before it was ever a geographical one. It’s exactly from this short circuit that Pacifica departs, the new project by French photographer Hélène Havard, a body of work that doesn’t try to tell the “real” California, but moves inside the one already filtered, already imagined, already seen a thousand times before being lived.

Havard, a graduate of EFET in Paris, lived between France, England and Canada before settling in French Polynesia, where she still lives and works today. Photography and painting coexist throughout her path, and it’s no coincidence, since her images often carry the chromatic density and compositional construction of a painting, more than the documentary crispness of a photograph.

With Pacifica, Hélène Havard is interested in how people inhabit landscapes already saturated with imagination, and she does it by working on color, light and the vastness of spaces, the tools through which familiar places become subtly foreign, suspended between reality and fiction. In her images California isn’t so much a place as an effect: the late-afternoon light bleaching everything into pastel, the low-rise architecture of Venice Beach, bodies stretched out on the asphalt or the sand like extras in a film that was never shot. «It’s a territory — the photographer herself writes — built as much by images as by geography: everyday life takes on the atmosphere of a waking dream, and the line between the real and the imagined grows progressively more uncertain».

There’s something perfectly seasonal about this work, and that’s perhaps why it arrives at the right moment. Looking at it in the middle of summer means meeting it in its natural habitat, when the blinding midday light and the suspended feeling of vacation make the idea of a half-asleep landscape even more believable, poised between what you see and what you think you remember having already seen. Pacifica makes no promise to reveal the real California behind the cliché. On the contrary, it stays inside it, and it’s precisely from there, from the most saturated point of the collective imagination, that it manages to make it look strange again.