The exhibition Clouds Are Not Spheres, specially designed for the Les Photographiques festival, brings together a collection of works created in recent years by Raphaël Dallaporta, in collaboration with researchers, particularly with the Laboratoire Manceau de Mathématiques.

The title is inspired by Benoît Mandelbrot's quote: "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circular arcs, the bark of a tree is not smooth, and lightning does not travel in a straight line." This French-American mathematician, known for developing fractal geometry in 1975, appeals to our common sense to better appreciate the infinite complexity of nature.

Through works such as Covariance (2015), where the illusion of a cloudy sky is composed of 48 variations of a statistical function from a current study on modeling randomness; Astrarium (2020), where a medieval astronomical clock represents the harmony of the retrograde motion of the planets with luminous loops; or Equation of Time (2019-2021), which captures the discrepancies between legal time and true solar time through photographic records, where the length of the day is not uniformly 24 hours, the artist, winner of the Niépce Prize in 2019, demonstrates through photography the elegance involved in the study of randomness alongside astronomy and historical attempts to predict the events surrounding us.