The series Veils pays homage to the Lutetian Sea, a vast and shimmering expanse that once submerged large parts of present-day Europe 45 million years ago, during the Eocene epoch. Beneath its tranquil waves, calcareous microorganisms such as coccoliths drifted, their skeletal shields settling over millennia to form the chalky substrata that shape many landscapes today. This luminous sediment, born of transformation and eternity, became a bedrock of memory—a mineral archive that holds the whispers of vanished oceans while sculpting the contours of the earth above. The chalk beneath these landscapes is a ghostly remnant of this marine prehistory, resonating with the memory of an ancient seabed layered with calcium-rich exoskeletons of coccoliths deposited in waters long since receded. Above, the land intertwines with fossilized traces of marine forests and reefs, their presence hauntingly echoing the Lutetian waves that once enveloped Europe. Julian Charrière’s Veils navigates these temporal strata, weaving a dialogue between deep geological memory and the fragile ecosystems of the present. Through digital photography, he captures the vibrancy of coral reefs—living cathedrals of biodiversity now under siege in the Anthropocene. The RGB spectrum serves as both a tool of standardization and a medium of permanence, translating the fleeting vitality of marine life into enduring digital relics. Yet these photolithographies extend beyond the digital, grounding themselves in the mineral essence of the Lutetian geological record. Chalk pigments, extracted from ancient marine strata, are ground into fine particles, their muted hues carrying the essence of a vanished ocean world. Through photolithogravure—a 19th-century printmaking technique employing limestone of marine origin—these pigments are reanimated, embedding the images within the material memory of their origin. The resulting prints are not merely representations but physical extensions of the landscapes they depict—a fusion of visual language and geological truth. This interplay of media and material evokes a quiet elegy for coral reefs, whose once-vivid hues are fading under the relentless pressures of climate change and coral bleaching. These skeletal remnants, stripped of life and color, mirror the chalk formations underpinning Veils—a stark reminder of nature’s inexorable cycles of creation and collapse. Against this backdrop of loss, the work bridges the memory of a vanished sea with the precarious vibrancy of today’s oceans, offering a poignant meditation on ecological fragility and resilience. The prints themselves, pale and subdued like bleached corals or chalk cliffs, embody themes of fragility and transformation. Their muted aesthetic evokes the inevitable cycles of life, where flourishing vitality surrenders to dust and memory. This pallor reflects nature’s rhythms, where luminosity dims to shadow yet endures in mineral stillness. Ultimately, Veils unfolds as a spectral hymn to a liquid world—a meditation on the convergence of memory and matter, of life and geological time. It invites us to hear the murmurs of ancient seas, fossilized in chalk, while bearing witness to the fragile beauty of ecosystems teetering on the brink of disappearance.