Toute ma peau a une âme
Read the text | Diaporama | Back to gallery
Set of 13 photographs.
Sizes and process:
Set of studio color photographs.
H 70 X L 90cm and H 90 X L 70cm , Giclee process on Hahnemühle PhotoRag Baryta 315gr Fine Art paper.
Limited edition of 5.
Price: € 1,850 incl. More information.
For centuries, Italian painting has watched bodies suffer and taken pains to make them beautiful. A severed head in a fold of velvet, a dish on which one offers up one’s cut-off breasts, hands reaching toward a body taken down from the cross: everything is weighed, lit, and rendered with a lapidary’s tenderness. We have learned to look at these scenes as we look at a jewel. Pain has become a craft.
This series traces these painted scenes: the colours, the poses, the light, the composition. But the bodies are those of young people of today, costumed, made up, photographed in a studio, with nothing of the backstage concealed. The costume shows; the greasepaint can be guessed at. The models come from a generation raised inside the image, one that knows what it is to expose oneself, to compose oneself, to be looked at, and that knows the price of the skin one shows. They inhabit the pose without submitting to it. Judith, Agatha, the grieving at the foot of the cross: they put them on as one puts on an ancient language, to see what it still has to say.
The disguise does not protect; it reveals. What was sublime suddenly becomes close: a wrist tensing, a shoulder trembling, a gaze that no longer feigns the serenity of the martyr. What the masters adorned, photography leaves bare. Acts of violence are suspended, never savoured, and what remains is what painting long kept silent: skin that knows, the body that remembers what is done to it.
Set against these tableaux vivants, Colette’s Sido serves as counterpoint. Colette writes skin differently, speaking of her mother, a free and emancipated woman. She offers us a world of handed-down gestures, of garden soil, of fever, and of attention to living things. A skin that feels, that drinks in the light, that learns from the world.
The series proposes neither to repair nor to condemn, only to look at the body without reducing it to its setting. Toute ma peau a une âme (“All my skin has a soul”): the phrase works as a refusal. A refusal that flesh should be a mere support, something to be adorned, wounded, offered or admired without anyone living inside it. In each image, someone is there, and looking back.
This work was woven together with Anne Savi, Anne Telyczka and a group of young students, whose names can be found in the Orders section.
Toute ma peau a une âme
Read the text | Back to gallery
Set of 13 photographs.
Sizes and process:
Set of studio color photographs.
H 70 X L 90cm and H 90 X L 70cm , Giclee process on Hahnemühle PhotoRag Baryta 315gr Fine Art paper.
Limited edition of 5.
Price: € 1,850 incl. More information.
For centuries, Italian painting has watched bodies suffer and taken pains to make them beautiful. A severed head in a fold of velvet, a dish on which one offers up one’s cut-off breasts, hands reaching toward a body taken down from the cross: everything is weighed, lit, and rendered with a lapidary’s tenderness. We have learned to look at these scenes as we look at a jewel. Pain has become a craft.
This series traces these painted scenes: the colours, the poses, the light, the composition. But the bodies are those of young people of today, costumed, made up, photographed in a studio, with nothing of the backstage concealed. The costume shows; the greasepaint can be guessed at. The models come from a generation raised inside the image, one that knows what it is to expose oneself, to compose oneself, to be looked at, and that knows the price of the skin one shows. They inhabit the pose without submitting to it. Judith, Agatha, the grieving at the foot of the cross: they put them on as one puts on an ancient language, to see what it still has to say.
The disguise does not protect; it reveals. What was sublime suddenly becomes close: a wrist tensing, a shoulder trembling, a gaze that no longer feigns the serenity of the martyr. What the masters adorned, photography leaves bare. Acts of violence are suspended, never savoured, and what remains is what painting long kept silent: skin that knows, the body that remembers what is done to it.
Set against these tableaux vivants, Colette’s Sido serves as counterpoint. Colette writes skin differently, speaking of her mother, a free and emancipated woman. She offers us a world of handed-down gestures, of garden soil, of fever, and of attention to living things. A skin that feels, that drinks in the light, that learns from the world.
The series proposes neither to repair nor to condemn, only to look at the body without reducing it to its setting. Toute ma peau a une âme (“All my skin has a soul”): the phrase works as a refusal. A refusal that flesh should be a mere support, something to be adorned, wounded, offered or admired without anyone living inside it. In each image, someone is there, and looking back.
This work was woven together with Anne Savi, Anne Telyczka and a group of young students, whose names can be found in the Orders section.
