This series conceptually follows in the footsteps of Ed Ruscha's iconic work, "Various Small Fires," which was reinterpreted in Bruce Nauman's "Burning Small Fires," and then again by Jonathan Monk with "Small Fires Burning." By re-appropriating the motif of fire as an artistic gesture, Vincent Mesaros develops a new chapter where the burned objects are no longer books or films, but symbols: a tarot card, a madeleine, a die.

Each photograph condenses a cultural reference: cartomancy with "Repentence", Proust with "Réminiscence", Mallarmé with "Conjuration," and offers a reflection on the link between image, memory, and destiny. Fire acts as a revealer: it draws as much as it erases, embedding destruction as a form of thought. This visual ritual makes the burned object a metaphor for internal drawing, involuntary memory, and the creative act.

The burning of the Excuse card (The Fool in tarot) extends the chain of references begun with Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, and Jonathan Monk, while injecting a new symbolic layer. The act of burning this card, a marginal and unpredictable figure, becomes an act of artistic ritual. It evokes both creative destruction and divination, loss and revelation. The series, as a whole, questions the limits of the visible, memory, and artistic transmission through fire as a medium of transformation.

_AI-generated text