Blending fashion, editorial work, and visual art, Tarèck Raffoul's photographic style maintains the same precision and originality in the situations he composes. A young photographer, videographer, and art director living in France, Raffoul's work has already established an international presence, collaborating with several major brands and magazines.

His latest series of photographs Where do we go before we sleep?, presented at the gallery Nouchine Pahlevan Last autumn, it was built on a very simple idea: how to represent the wanderings of the mind in that moment of semi-sleep that is falling asleep. Perhaps even more so, it raises the question of this in-between, this passage between two states of body and mind.

The images are strongly marked by a neon aesthetic, evoking an entire filmography, of Nicolas Winding Refn to the scenes in Barry Jenkins' Moonlight. This aesthetic is also magnified in his latest editorials for Vogue Arabia ou Louis Vuitton, added to his skill in staging portraits through the interplay of bodies themselves, framing that plays on what is off-screen, and the interactions between the public and the model through the lens.

The space of sleep, at night, is also traditionally that of metamorphosis, a space outside of time and social context. While the aesthetics and framing draw on his experience as a fashion photographer, the models and interactions chosen by Tareck RaffouThey offer bodily intimacies that play with these normative aestheticizations.

These moments of emptiness and metamorphosis seem to recur in the photographer's universe, literally in his series Ashes to Nature, where the skin becomes a place of germination, and where the framing cuts up and diverts these bodies in renewal.

TARECK.CO
@TARECKRAFFOUL