calendario eventi  :: 

X

27/1/2015

Two Exhibitions

L'espace Photographique Contretype, Bruxelles

Emilia Stéfani-Law
La Mue/The Sloughing
Curated by Chris Bourne

Emilia Stéfani-Law was born in Paris in 1979. She obtained a diploma in Photography from the Ecole supérieure des Arts visuels “Le 75” in Brussels, and then worked in various roles in photography and its margins before spending three years making more and more frequent trips to North America – these comings and goings inspired her double volume of images White Days/Le Refuge (over there and here, or at least how she coped with it in her mind) published last year by Yellow Now.

Her work has already been exhibited in Belgium, including at The Bathroom at Contretype, which was a sort of ante-room in those days. She is an expert at intimate and allusive photography, which could also be called atmospheric or autobiographical, through its tangents and tiny touches.
Emilia Stéfani-Law has chosen to call her new solo exhibition “La Mue” (“The Sloughing”). Should we see in its images a turning, a revolution, the shedding of a skin? Or perhaps rather a surge, the gradual, frank and direct awareness of other people, of exteriority and otherness, which follow each other in, and also become allies of, a world initially experienced through projection and representation. A little less rose-coloured, surrounded by a little less grey, and also a little less solitude.

Inextricable plant-like surfaces where lines dissolve into powder and lose themselves rather than tracing a path…

Faces, most often of children and young people: we do not know if they were captured at the moment they were constructing their images or when they were letting them image go, nor if they were still or moving, but they appear to be hesitating between floating attitudes and moods.

Large flat surfaces of light, that you have to scrutinise from close up to discern the nuance and the subject, like a solitary skin which hates the cold, but which, almost imperceptibly, moves and shivers.

Timid breakthroughs into the legendary wide open spaces of America under the soft, washed-out glow of a polaroid; the allusion to another world creates new encounters, new chapters in a story with neither a beginning nor an end.

And then softness, again and forever, again and despite everything, without wearying. The softness of touch, of a look at the moment you look someone in the face, or of a word at the no less delicate moment when you turn your back.

If all photography is a sort of sloughing - a peeling-off of a layer of real life thanks to a new sensitivity – perhaps we should also consider, without bitterness, that, at the end of the day all sloughings are also nothing but images. And that is what is at stake! But these images can also represent fragility and beauty.

Some photographers take photos to reinforce their beliefs, others to question or challenge them. Perhaps Emilia’s reason for taking photos is to protect herself and to free herself from the certainties
of others.

----

Francisco Supervielle 'Variations'

The Variations series by Francisco Supervielle is looking for meanings which cannot be found in narration as we know it. His attention is driven by the aesthetic force of certain objects, details, gestures, textures, lights or faces. Searches are performed as part of his daily routine, as if this space was not well known and likely to be seized. His images could be described as poetic, although poetry is not only the goal, but the driving force. Discovering the photographic potential of everything that surrounds us is an intrinsic part of his approach.

He looks carefully, thinks and then projects himself. For him, photography is not a mirror held up to the real world, but rather the deceptive extent of our perception of it. The landscape suddenly grows larger when realise that photography is not really able to give an account of the real world. A dialogue begins, and every image becomes a representation of a more promising ideal than our day-to-day perception of reality.

Variations is a concrete mirage of the imagined world, which leads to an unexpected perception of lyrical design.

Image: Emilia Stéfani-Law, from series La Mue, 2013, 40 x 40 cm

Press Contact:
Evelyne BIVER, eb.contretype@skynet.be

Opening: 28 January 2015

Contretype
Cité Fontainas, 4A
Fontainashof, 4A
1060 Saint-Gilles - Sint-Gillis
T. 02-538.42.20 | F. 02-538.99.19

stampa

permanent link