VENICE, ITALY.- Gregory Colbert had been that rare artist who goes out of his way not to be noticed. He was represented by no gallery, he held no exhibitions for a decade, and he gave no interviews. He made 27 lengthy trips to distant corners of the world over nine years. He was usually accompanied by a support team, supplies and equipment. In brief, it was both costly and complicated to produce images of great simplicity. Now, in the vast and sober space of the Arsenale, the Renaissance-era shipyard owned by the Venice Biennale, Mr. Colbert, 42, is for the first time exhibiting the fruits of these voyages. The Canadian artist shows 200 images and a 58-minute documentary in the exhibition "Ashes and Snow," which runs in Venice through July 6. This show depicts a realm that humans share with elephants, whales, cranes, ibises and other creatures. The earth-tone photographs are printed on Japanese handmade paper, yet the power of the images comes less from their formal beauty than from the way they envelop the viewer in their mood. They are accompanied by no captions, because it matters little how or when or where the photographs were taken. They are simply windows to a world in which silence and patience govern time. Of course they are also the work of an artist. In other words, they are not nature photographs but careful compositions in which humans and animals are juxtaposed in unexpected ways. A different kind of alchemy is at work in the Arsenale, which for the first time has devoted its entire 140,000-square-foot exhibition area to a single artist. By hanging his 40-by-118-inch photographs in relative isolation on either side of a 900-foot-long gallery, Mr. Colbert has given his elephants and whales space to roam freely through the imagination. They then come alive on the screen at the end of the gallery.