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LES APPARENCES
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SALTATION
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UNTITLED
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HUIS CLOS
Les apparences is a work in progress that explores the weight of homophobic insults and the various roles adopted to avoid them. Through these self-stagings, shame becomes a transformative energy and photography becomes a tool for emancipation, focusing on the process that leads from the fear of stigma to its reversal.
In the image Dos #1, a male back, strangely missing arms and a head, is placed on a gray paper pedestal, itself held by a metal rod. The background is also gray paper, but a lighter shade, thus decontextualizing the entire scene. One can see a reference to sculptures glorifying a certain perfection of the male body, as in the ancient works of Myron or the more realistic and symbolic pieces by Rodin. However, the intentionally artificial and sanitized aesthetic of the image questions this heritage and accentuates the sense of bodily discontinuity. The digital removal of certain limbs further disturbs our perception, referring both to the personification of a censored desire that one seeks to recover through various forms of representation such as sculpture, and to certain beauty standards as well as the historically rooted physical and social posture of the male body, as explored by Alix Marie.
The video Untitled presents an empty stage devoid of any audience, introduced by several cameras placed to encompass the entire space. I then enter this stage, playing a character who appears strangely wary of an absent audience. Initially remaining inactive, he is subsequently duplicated into several characters, each reacting in their own way under the gaze of an imagined audience suggested by the empty seats. Although this film is still in progress, its intention is to address the fear of stigma and the strategies employed to avoid self-disclosure, echoing writings by Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis. Whether it truly exists or is simply a product of the protagonist’s imagination, this audience plays a fundamental role, as the protagonist performs solely for it, taking on various roles to avoid revealing himself. Finally, this project will take the form of an installation: a wooden box, with the dimensions of a photo booth, evoking the allegory of the closet. Images will be displayed on the outside, while a video is projected on the inside. To experience it, the viewer must open the door and enter in the enclosed space.
Saltation is a series of three self-portraits that explore the relationship with the self, the body and the posture adopted to face the external gaze. Through notions of self-control and appearance management, this work explores how each individual constructs their own representation, constantly oscillating between self-expression and the pressure to adopt certain social poses.
The initial intention of this series was to play with relatively conventional, stereotypical poses derived from certain social codes, and then to counter them by adopting their opposite stance. However, once the range of possible poses had been exhausted, preparation gave way to improvisation and more unusual expressions. Developed around an automatic shooting protocol, approximately five-hundred images were produced, all taken with a camera placed frontally against a white paper background and lit from multiple sources to ensure an even scene. As the images progressed, I gradually let go, sometimes finding myself hunched over, sometimes stretching out, reminiscent of Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities series.
Ultimately, this work is about how we play with our own image and the inherent complexity of any quest for self-representation. It also highlights the ambiguity of the control offered by photographic editing when attempting to convey a symbolic truth.
Each portrait was created in a studio using a Hasselblad 500 CM and Kodak Portra 160 film, against paper backgrounds representing the six theorised colours. Once developed, the images were scanned and assembled into a contact sheet, giving the viewer a sense of authenticity and evoking the photographic process. The resulting print was then hung on the wall like wallpaper, confronting the viewer with real size portraits that reinforce the ambiguity of the subject’s proximity.
The work thus emphasises the evocative power of colour, playing with repetition and variation. Using a clean, minimalist aesthetic, the project explores the relationship between appearance and chromatic symbolism, opening up a space for reflection on perception and the role of colour in our collective imagination.
Huis clos is a series of images composed of twenty-four photographs, divided into six groups. Each group thus depicts a room in a fictional apartment in which models pose with an attitude emphasizing their solitude, cohabiting with a decor that is uniquely theirs. Though each room appears distinct, all of these sets were in fact constructed in a single space, my bedroom, reinforcing the sense of an enclosed environment. These rooms are represented through a wide shot, a still life, a portrait, and finally a close-up. By creating these spaces from scratch, the intention is to invite the viewer to question themes such as staging, the performed image, photographic theatricality, and perception.
The images first catch the eye with their centered framing, frontal viewpoints, and minimalist aesthetic. Studio backdrops are used as walls, which immediately creates ambiguity regarding reality while also reinforcing the specificity of each room by assigning it a particular color. The objects themselves are few in number and, as a result, stand out more prominently, both in their own right and in relation to each other. Finally, the characters are shown alone, among objects, in moments of pause, hovering between presence and absence, thus recalling certain interior scenes from figurative painting, as exemplified for instance by Vilhelm Hammershøi or Bernard Buffet.
Through these stagings, reality and unreality merge thanks to the ambivalence created between ornamentation and objectivity, also evoking Thomas Demand’s ambiguous scenarios. Moreover, a kind of absurdity emerges from the fact that objects and figures occupy the same level: the characters are thereby objectified, while the objects are elevated. Furthermore, the models’ poses seem to question their very existence. Their faces are melancholic, their expressions stiff, their bodies frozen, reminiscent of certain portraits by Charles Fréger. Lastly, a particular relationship to perception is called into question, reminiscent of Barbara Probst. How do we see things? How is a completely artificial space perceived? How do images conceived as a series influence one another? How can a single image create the dramatic shift that alters the viewer’s gaze ?