ABOUT THE WORK
“Les Secrètes”( 2007-2010) and “Christaldéhydes Absinthes” ( 2009-2011)
Florence D’elle writes pictures about women coming from all walks of life. All these women make up the different facets of what the artist refers to as the Universal Woman. Vestals, Goddesses, flowers just blooming, purple, insolent, disturbing, passionate, mystical, imaginary of melancholy, by offering themselves, these women are those who lead the dance and run the game. Transgressing conventions and placed in the centre of the work, they give life to their imagination and imagination of the artist.
The beauty is bold, irreverent, wild and violent, solid or ethereal.
Scenes of dreaming, erotic scenes, fantasies are quite happily unresolved mysteries and an imaginary projection of oneself…
« Re Birth » ( 2010-2014)
Re Birth Press Kit : click here
"There is talk of paths in the Re Birth serie of Florence D'elle.
And indeed the plural paths. On the substance and form, those -ci draw a path at once aesthetic and intimate.
All-or almost-yet has already been "invented" or "shown" in terms of "naked" and particularly as regards the female nude.
If the starting point for the work of Florence D'elleit seems to be that of academicism and classicism, the gradual unveiling of his images sows doubt. Questioning emerges, the result of a shift in its vision, its about.
Of course, while discovering the first images of the series, we think a tribute to feminine beauty, a perfect female beauty, sacred, in this case a deep black. The body can match it to the canons of Greek sculpture and, haloed with a side light to those seized by the great painters of chiaroscuro, as Caravaggio and Titian.
Yet another thing to surreptitiously interferes in the discovery of this work. The artist engages us without our knowledge a detour to a crossroad where we realize that his portraits are much more complex than they appear, and the mastery with which they are illuminated, is perhaps be ultimately a superb stooges. While Florence's approach from it stopped there, it would already work in itself.
But this mastery of light and staging requires us to gradually realize that Florence D'elle it confronts us with a questioning of perfection, time, disappearance.
By highlighting the same way different bodies, young and sculptural or otherwise subject to the vagaries of time and accidents of life, it challenges us to the concept of beauty together on our own to the body. It rehabilitates with great humanity and an undeniable artistry which is little or not shown in the flood of pictures spilled daily by the media and advertising. The bodies are those over women round, forms less perfect, more generous. She joined in this the great masters of Flemish painting as Rubens, and also invites in this pantheon of older women on the body which life comes in its most real.
It is this sensitivity and the utmost sincerity that outcrop us in this "Re Birth" Florence D'elle it not only offers these models, but also to ourselves.
Olivier Bourgoin, Director of Révélateur Agency, Paris
"The nude body is sincerity: honesty that everyone can have"
Jacinto Benavente
"Resili O" ( 2015-2017)
His latest photographic project, Resili O, is presented here.
This personal work (2015-2017) was initiated following the brutal death of his companion. He explores the theme of the Resilience in an original way through 5 conductive chapters: still life and living nature, portrait, nude, desire-love and finally hope.
Still life refers to the inextricable, the unnameable and the violence.
The damaged portrait gently reveals his face in pieces, covers the sight and its various senses. The anesthetized and bruised body takes life and place. The soul and the body give way to the possibility of feeling alive, vibrating and perhaps loving again, as the desire and the love illustrate. Finally, the world and hope bathe in their light, which refers to Life, Self, Being and the Other.
As Boris Cyrulnik very well describes, resilience is the ability to navigate between torrents. Works here can follow or mingle, as a personal path.
What better technical choice than silver photography and the use of the old alternative techniques of drawing (wet collodion, Lith, charcoal or bromoil) using the polaroid, the medium, the large format and even the video which make works for the to illustrate a theme as sensitive, precious and painful and personal as the path of Resilience? It is thus offering a support as valuable as this is the way the artist wishes to give the public by confronting him with the questions that death arouses with sensitivity and sincerity.
A Tale (2019-2020)
Statement of intent
After an author's photographic journey of several years in digital (Les Secrètes, Re Birth), I have been exploring the meanders of historical techniques for more than five years now.
After Resili O, the roughest photographic series I seem to have taken on this subject, I present here my latest personal project, the culmination of an introspective journey over a year. Lulled by Jane Campion's Piano Lesson, Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast or Loreena McKennitt's ballads by the fireside in the Brocéliande forest, I wrote this tale, my tale, my story.
Dreamlike, dreamy, silent, self-confessed, chaotic, scorching, uncertain but luminous, this is a tale that has its roots over several decades in a dreamy past of a woman sometimes confronted with violence.
It was important for me to be present in the form of self-portraits and images of my daughter and to bring this project outwards, a form of Pan's labyrinth, Turin's shroud, a magical world that creates another reality in an inter-generational language: slow photography is an extension of oneself with an overcoming of situations of impact or pain.
Using the collodion camera is a process that happens inside of me. It gives a rhythm of timelessness. The tree is a door that opens space. Imperfections belong to the slow process and represent the keys to its language. I like to cover my tracks and keep a part of mystery.
The desire to achieve it only with the old technique of wet collodion in tintypes was to bring materiality, slowness, palpable reverie of an organic and carnal support in a writing imprinted with symbols but nevertheless giving free rein to the imagination. The slowness of the time devoted to this technique is inseparable from the constantly constructed content that one wishes to deposit there.