Leo Caillard is interested in museum presentation. As a plastic artist, he therefore questions both display models known as diorama and the means implemented by man to try to reproduce the living on the brink of disappearing. The 'Dioramas'by Caillard are trompe l’œil. The animals in the foreground very much belong to museum dioramas. The backgrounds are however assemblage of other photographic works. The artist reintegrates them as the real ecosystems of depicted species. The photographer also questions the need for reconstruction. Like an admission of failure, man recreates an artificial nature that he knows doomed to extinction. Between reality and fiction, time is suspended in a structure like Noah’s Ark. The presentation in diorama form confuses members of the public who no longer know if they are at a show or watching the tragic staging of an ineluctable drama.

**The artist: Leo Caillard**

Leo Caillard has practised photography since the age of 16. It was therefore a very natural choice for him to make it his profession. On leaving Gobelins (School of the Image) in 2008, he became a freelance photographer at barely 23 years old. He spent the following year in New York. He chose to complete his training there as an assistant to other photographers. This journey also allowed him to develop personal work that he conceived as a series. Retouching and montage quickly imposed as his medium of photography: ‘I like to create images at the edge of reality, with a play on pretence.