Blending photographic tools with painterly gestures, the work of this Belgian artist both captivates and disconcerts. A wonderful discovery at the Les Filles du Calvaire gallery, which is dedicating its first solo exhibition in France to him, featuring a magnificent series of photographs on canvas resulting from an encounter with dancers.
From the painting techniques she learned at the Luca School in Brussels, Lore Stessel has indeed retained the support—the canvas—and the gesture—the one by which she applies the gelatin silver emulsion to the fabric to reveal the images. For the rest (recording the images on film, developing them, and printing them), it is firmly photography—a practice she learned at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles. The blending of processes is all the richer and more eloquent as it is applied to a choreography: as if the fluidity of the brushstrokes applying the developing emulsion sought to harmonize with that of the moving bodies, in order to render their ephemeral beauty with the utmost precision.
Gelatin silver emulsion on canvas from a gelatin silver negative,
110 x 140 x 4cm
Gelatin silver emulsion on canvas from a gelatin silver negative,
145 x 180 cm
Gelatin silver emulsion on canvas from a gelatin silver negative, 145 x 180 cm
Gelatin silver emulsion on canvas from a gelatin silver negative, 100 x 140 cm
These photographs exude both great power and great delicacy, as well as profound sincerity. The figures, focused on their movements, do not pose… Full of tension, these bodies are strikingly truthful. A truth that is both firmly rooted in time – the dancers, dressed in shorts and T-shirts, are very much of our era – and timeless – through 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 photographs in the series that show intertwined bodies evoking love, struggle or hope…: “a subtle multiplicity of feelings,” to use the artist's own words, who had already said, at the 2012 Planches Contact festival in Deauville, where she was recognized as a “Young Talent”: “The photographs metamorphose. They exist between dream and reality, light and shadow, movement and stillness.”
LORESTESSEL.COM
@LORESTESSEL
"LORE STESSEL. WAVE"
GALLERY THE DAUGHTERS OF CALVARY
17, RUE DES FILLES-DU-CALVAIRE, PARIS 3RD
UNTIL DECEMBER 20, 2023
FILLESDUCALVAIRE.COM
