LA CHIMÈRE (The Chimera), 2007
5 inkjet prints mounted on aluminum, 4 prints 86 x 70 cm, 1 print 122 x 86 cm
Exhibition views, Plattform07, KunstWollen, ewz-Unterwerk Selnau, Zurich, 2007
"Our chimeras are what resembles us better."1
"We get and we are a body. Of this ambiguity is born the dualism, which compares body and mind. From the gap between the image which we have of ourselves, partly unconscious, and the appearance shown, subjected to the liking of circumstances, is born the feeling that it is difficult to be one. The flesh is an obviousness given, led to grow and to distort itself apart from our will. The face is the place of hidden significations, where the feeling of transparency of subject to himself finds its first denial and collides with the intuition of the world hidden in the middle of oneself, close and inaccessible at the same time. The face is at the beginning of a revelation. It formulates a promise, without being ever in position to hold it."2
The photograph is a test of dispossession, it reads the face always new, makes it unrecognizable, and underlines it by its mimetic force, the ambivalence of our relation to the real.
"The Chimera" is a hybrid creature, compounded here summarily of a face and a hand. The monster, being inconceivable, constitutes a challenge for the thought. To be bearable, it is important that the horror doesn’t remain completely insane to the eyes of the men.
The series "La Chimère" is compounded of portraits of one subject, thoroughly orchestrated in studio. Without reference to some social context, the photographed person resembles in a "model doll" among which the dissimilarities linked to the device, provoke uncertainty. Would it be the one and same character or a mask of itself?
1. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, 1862
2. Purposes named by the book Des visages. Essai d’anthropologie de David Le Breton, éd. Métailié, 2003
