It's a most peculiar, indefinable sensation, a certain unsettling something, that takes hold of us when we look into the eyes of the faces photographed by Laurent Lafolie. A futile attempt, moreover, since it proves impossible to fix these fleeting gazes.

And for good reason: they belong to no one, or rather, they are the sum of multiple gazes. Created from the superimposition of hundreds of faces photographed with a large-format camera via an analog screen capture, these "faces" seem to disintegrate, disappear as they appear to us, or metamorphose, somewhat like the unfathomable Mona Lisa: to achieve the universality of the face by diffracting it into an infinity of other possibilities This, indeed, is the “paradoxical quest” pursued by the artist, according to Marguerite Pilven, curator of the exhibition. To highlight the ambiguity of the photographic image, suspended between presence and absence, she boldly and skillfully plays with its materiality. This is evident in her enamel prints using platinum and palladium enamels on white porcelain plates, which imbue the captured ghostly faces with a presence, a “corporeality” all the more unsettling for being artificial.

LITHOPHANIES

Similarly, it is to "examine […] this medium of appearance that is the photographic medium 1" that Laurent Lafolie makes his faces appear in his series UN through pigment printing on silk threads. By weaving faces with a single thread of dyed silk, passed from top to bottom through a frame […], the artist creates a pattern that alternates between voids and solids. He thus softens the opposition between presence and absence, so powerfully felt when confronted with the representation of a human figure. 1. In his lithophanes, it is the light that, passing through a thin engraved porcelain plate, reveals the faces. Faces hidden by the play of hands, as if to signify to the viewer the necessity of another perception of the image and encourage him to looking for one's own image 2”.
Although his work in 20 panels, created by printing pigments on engraved photopolymer plates and washi paper, belongs to the landscape genre, it stems from the same research: entitled The Origin of Images, this composition " It also calls on the viewer to produce their own synthesis, thus escaping the fixity of a single point of view. 1”.

1 Marguerite Pilven, curator of the exhibition
2 Quotes from the artist taken from an interview conducted on October 6, 2016 by Anne-Frédérique Fer, available as a podcast on France Fine Art (revue.francefineart.com)

“LAURENT LAFOLIE – A” BINÔME GALLERY
19, RUE CHARLEMAGNE, PARIS 4TH
UNTIL JULY 29, 2023
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