LES APPARENCES, 2025
Les apparences is a work in which I become a character who takes shape and lays himself bare, seeking to escape the social condemnation of homosexuality that he has likely internalized. Through these stagings of the self, shame becomes a transformative energy and photography a tool of emancipation. From the fear of stigma to its reversal. From the process that leads from the closet to the stage. In the image Dos #1, a male back, stripped of arms and head, rests on a gray paper plinth held by a metal rod; a lighter gray backdrop further decontextualizes the scene. It nods to sculptures glorifying an idealized male body—think Myron or Rodin—yet the deliberately artificial, sanitized aesthetic questions that lineage and heightens bodily discontinuity. The digital removal of limbs unsettles perception, evoking both the personification of censored, clandestine desire pursued through forms like sculpture, and entrenched norms of male physical and social posture as seen in works by Alix Marie or by Matthieu Croizier in Everything Goes Dark A Little Further Down. The video La bonne éducation shows an empty stage introduced by multiple cameras surveying the space. I enter as a wary figure before an absent audience. After a still moment, he splits into several characters, each reacting differently under the gaze of an imagined public, suggested by empty seats. The piece addresses fear of stigma and the strategies used to avoid disclosure, recalling texts by Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis. Whether this audience exists or is imagined, it is central: the protagonist performs roles for it alone, practicing self-censorship and social posturing. Presented as a split screen, the work recalls Gabriela Löffel’s Performance and explores multiplicity of roles, self-censorship, social posture, and self-fabulation. Finally, the work takes the form of an installation: a wooden box, the size of a photo booth, meant to evoke the allegory of the closet, picking up the idea of a metaphorical and physical space where identity is simultaneously concealed and affirmed. The images stapled to the exterior thus seek to shift the symbolic charge into public space by making visible what we tend to conceal, while inside the video is shown on a television screen, thereby reinforcing the sense of concealment and intimacy.
Pigment print on proofing paper,
64 x 48 cm
14,5 x 10,5 cm each
Pigment print on proofing paper,
64 x 48 cm
La bonne éducation, From the series Les apparences, 2025,4K digital video (16:9), color, sound, 5' 51" (looped),
single-channel installation
Salle Perrier, Renens,
2025
Salle Perrier, Renens,
2025
Salle Perrier, Renens,
2025