In the photographic series Buried Sunshines Burn, Charrière dives into the seeping asphaltum and bituminous residues of industrialization, exploring the crude histories of oil extraction. For these works he utilizes heliography, one of the medium’s oldest techniques developed in 1822 by French inventor Nicéphore Niépce. It necessitates an emulsion to be made, for which Charrière collected naturally occurring tar from the La Brea, McKittrick and Carpinteria Tar Pits, geological formations around Los Angeles. From a bird’s eye perspective, the series surveys Californian oil fields, where the subterranean discovery of petroleum in the late 19th century transfigured a vast and desolate Los Angeles basin into a megacity sprawl. The aerial views of the oil fields reveal winding rivers of hydrocarbons, seemingly coagulating just below the surface of our reality. Coiled beneath our world, their psychedelic patterns mirror the progression of actual oil spills, where the life blood of ancient biomes pours forth iridescent and sticky. These toxic but alluring forms also allude to the counterculture of California, historically entranced by utopian thinking, mind-altering drugs and spiritual freedom. The series seeks to capture the delirium of the petroleum industry and the black material which when pumped out of the ground acts as an almost hallucinatory accelerant for technology. At the same time, it stands as a conceptual mise en abyme; a mirror reflecting ourselves, being both a view of and from the flow of hydrocarbons, addressing their impact on our modern powers of visualisation through a return to material sources.