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First week of May, I went to see an amazing exhibition in Paris titled: Abysses. It was at National Museum of Natural History (MNHN), in front of the Great Mosque of Paris. I have always been fascinated by deep-sea and the creatures living down there; Jules Verne and his ‘Steampunk-like’ Nautilus definitely has something to do with that. A couple of years ago, I read a very interesting article about Claire Nouvian, a French journalist who became enthralled with the deep after visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 2001. I took the title for this post from the book she published: The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss. With this book, containing more than 220 large-format color photographs, descriptions and short essays, she invites us in a voyage to the bottom of the sea, where strange creatures live in some ways we could never expect they would. No light, almost no food, cold water or hot toxic water columns… Some of them have never been photographed before. The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss is a must-have book.

I was hoping I could see these creatures for real someday but only deep-sea biologists can see them. Then I heard about the Claire Nouvian exhibition at National Museum of Natural History and for the first time ever, real specimens will be exhibited. So how could they show to the public these bizarre deep-sea species since they don’t survive once on the surface? Easy: taxidermy. But of a new kind, using resin and filling agents to give these creatures a new life. So when I came to the MNHN, I was very excited to see them with my own eyes and I wasn’t disappointed at all. Resin boxes were everywhere, creatures were like frozen. The big photos and descriptions hung on the walls introduced us to many of these species, and a short-movie was also playing. It was so great to see some of my favorite deep-sea creatures like the Tuscaridium Cygneum or the Himantolophus Paucifilosus. I was totally immersed in the abysses with Jellyfish worm, gelatinous octopus, fishes looming in the darkness… Everything was astonishing, beautiful, grotesque… And dark. So little is known about those creatures. Until twenty-five years ago, the deep sea was virgin territory to biologists, and only about 5 percent of the deep-sea floor has been mapped as of today.

This exhibition was one of the best I have ever seen. It was a very hot day, everyone was sweating buckets but I had an extraordinary moment discovering for the first time in 3D, one of the main source of inspiration for my work. Sadly, I couldn’t buy the book from the exhibition, it was sold-out for weeks, but hopefully it will be available online soon. If you can’t find the exhibition book, I strongly suggest you to buy Claire Nouvian’s The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss. It is available for less than $30 and the whole family can enjoy together this guided and illustrated visit to the deep-sea. And most significantly, it gives us an insight to a world we don’t know yet but we are already in the process of destroying, as a consequence of the destruction of our own environment. An alarming observation with soon to be irreversible damages.