Atelier

Here is some pictures from a series I started in early 2005, shooting during parties and familly gathering. When I decide to start a new session, I try to convince every man in the room to let me shoot him with my right hand as I squeeze his mouth with my left hand.
It’s a portrait study. With a small dose of gender study : I decided to squeeze only men. No women, because squeezing the face of a woman would mean something totally different, given the genders relationships as they are.

Why do I found them to be beautiful in such a pose, ridiculed, unglorious and suffering? I think it’s because, all strong men as they are, they accepted to loose a little bit of social status, becoming fragile for a moment.

Logos and brands are everywhere. It seems that nobody would wear a non-branded pair of sneakers ! But, hey, those branded sneakers are costly, and with the hot summer we have every year, going barefoot is really preferable. So I made sneakers for free for my friends, drawing a logo directly on their feet from memory. and we documented it with a polaroid and a large format camera.

Last summer, I was at a wedding party in the french countryside. Everybody was slowly going barefoot, enjoying the feeling of the grass as the night was falling. We were talking with complete strangers, and my way of socializing is by the mean of micro performances. I guess any gathering, any party, is just a field of experimentation to me.

So I grabbed some pen and markers I always have with me, and began to give a present to anyone that would accept it : a pair of free sneakers, only from the best brands.

I made a few polaroid with my SX-70 to document the gift of the sneakers, and my friend Marc joined me with his large format camera, taking black and white picture using the natural light. Here is his raw contact sheet :

There was a collective effort at work in collecting visual memories about the most well known sneaker brands. Because, coming for a wedding party, nobody was wearing any of those brand that night.

I probably like too much to undress people. Just a few days after the september 2005 session of Ex/timité - where dozens of people have pressed their skin on my scanner - iMAL made a call for participation in a workshop. They were setting up a three-weeks-long run, with a pack of talented people helping up to ten artists to piece together their interactive installations.
A few hours later, I came up with a nice idea for the call, an idea I’d really like to experiment : The photographer is not a vicious man. An interactive installation that could have the same effect on the participant as a low grade glamour photographer would have on a beginner model: push that person to undress more !

The title came from a song composed by Philip Glass. And the set mimic a photography studio set, where only the photographer is missing. iMAL liked the project. But unfortunately, I was unable to arrange to go to Bruxelles to work on it and set it up, for lack of time and fund for the project.

So this a stalled project for the moment.

But you can read more, in french, on the dedicated page.

This new section of jlndrr.net is supposed to stand for the Atelier Visits that are part of the life of a painter or a sculptor. I have no atelier, studio or workshop where you could just look around and see works in progress, unfinished, or just about to be finished. Now there is this blog-styled, RSSized part of my website. This is not a portfolio and it’s not a news page either, but rather an invitation to keep an eye on what’s going on, for both friends and strangers.

Sorry, the Atelier is in english only. That’s because my french to english translation skills are really not that good. So it’s far easier for me to write those notes directly in english, for a bit of internationalism.