Blending the tools of photography with the gesture of painting, the Belgian artist's work both seduces and disconcerts. A wonderful discovery for Les Filles du Calvaire gallery, which is devoting its first solo show to her in France with a magnificent series of photographs on canvas, the result of an encounter with dancers.
From the painting she learned at the Luca School in Brussels, Lore Stessel has kept the support - canvas - and the gesture - the one by which she applies (to the fabric) the gelatin-silver emulsion that reveals the images. The rest (recording images on film, developing and printing them) is photography - a practice she learned at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles. The blend of processes is all the richer and more eloquent when applied to a choreography: as if the fluidity of the gesture applying the revealing emulsion with a brush wanted to match that of bodies in motion, in order to render their ephemeral beauty with the utmost accuracy.
Gelatine-silver emulsion on canvas from gelatine-silver negative,
110 x 140 x 4cm
Gelatin silver emulsion on canvas from gelatin silver negative,
145 x 180 cm
Gelatine-silver emulsion on canvas from gelatine-silver negative, 145 x 180 cm
Gelatine-silver emulsion on canvas from gelatine-silver negative, 100 x 140 cm
There's a great power and delicacy, but also a great sincerity, that emanates from these shots, where the figures, concentrated on their movements, don't pose... All in tension, these bodies are crying out for truth. A truth that is both very much of our time - the dancers, dressed in shorts and T-shirts, are very much of our time - and timeless - thanks to the use of black and white.
Beauty here rhymes with emotion, the emotion contained in every gesture, every movement of hands, arms, legs or feet, every twist or collision. Poetry of the gang is the title of several shots in the series, showing intertwined bodies evoking love, struggle or hope...: "a subtle multiplicity of feelings", in the words of the artist who already said, at the 2012 Planches Contact festival in Deauville, where she was spotted as a "Young Talent": "The photographs metamorphose. They lie between dream and reality, light and shadow, movement and fixity."
LORESTESSEL.COM
@LORESTESSEL
"LORE STESSEL. VAGUE"
GALERIE LES FILLES DU CALVAIRE
17, RUE DES FILLES-DU-CALVAIRE, PARIS 3E
UNTIL DECEMBER 20, 2023
FILLESDUCALVAIRE.COM
