Performance photography (body painting)

Performance photography and body painting retain the presence of actions in which body, colour and space form a temporary image. L’une, Untitled (performance), The Layers, 9 Lives, Awakening and Sleepers 2, made between 2013 and 2018, trace this research. These photographs are not mere documents: they frame an appearance, a gesture and a relationship between painted skin, movement and setting. Each image keeps the memory of lived time while composing an autonomous work.

Performance photography — body painting

This group of works approaches performance photography — body painting as a field of attention rather than a fixed recipe. photography, the painted body and performance space give the images their physical presence, while each work retains its own tempo and scale. The catalogue makes it possible to follow a line of research through distinct paintings and dates, without reducing them to a single effect.

Material and surface

The material is part of what the viewer reads. It catches or absorbs light, creates a density, and makes the surface active from a distance as well as at close range. Here, matter does not illustrate a subject: it establishes the conditions in which forms, traces and intervals can emerge.

Works as landmarks

L’une, Untitled (performance), The Layers, 9 Lives, Awakening and Sleepers 2 provide several points of entry into this vocabulary. Their titles should be read as individual landmarks, not as a closed sequence. Together they show how a recurring material can move between concentration, openness, contrast and reserve.

Gesture and rhythm

The works made between 2013 and 2018 show actions whose intensity and composition are both retained by photography. The resulting rhythm comes from relationships: between a dense area and a quieter one, between an edge and a field, between an immediate mark and a slower looking time. This is why the paintings reward a viewing that moves back and forth rather than a quick reading.

Colour, light and depth

Light changes the reading of the work without changing its identity. Depending on the angle, the surface can appear matt, granular, compact or more open. Colour is not simply added on top; it organises the spatial tension of the image and gives each painting its particular temperature.

From one work to another

Seen together, these works reveal variation as an essential part of the practice. A similar medium does not produce identical images. It allows differences of scale, framing, intensity and silence to become visible, so that every work remains autonomous while contributing to a wider body of research.

Time and memory

The dates in the catalogue matter because they keep the work in time. They do not force a linear story, but they allow continuities and returns to be noticed. A material can be taken up again years later with another intensity, while a title can preserve the trace of a thought, an encounter or a moment of looking.

Composition

Composition is never separated from material. The distribution of a dark area, a vertical, a gap or a colour changes the force of the surface. What appears spontaneous is held by decisions of balance. The works are therefore attentive both to movement and to the pauses that give movement its measure.

An open vocabulary

Rather than naming a fixed subject, this technique builds an open vocabulary. It can suggest figures, landscapes, interiors or states of mind without turning them into illustration. The viewer is invited to follow associations, to linger on the material facts of the painting, and to let the image remain available to several readings.

In the catalogue

Each record gives an occasion to return to a single work after viewing the group. Dimensions, date, title and image provide useful points of orientation, while the technique page preserves the relation between them. This alternation between the individual piece and the wider selection is central to understanding the work as a living archive.

Looking closely

The technique page offers a practical way to compare these works in the catalogue. It brings together paintings made with related materials and lets the viewer notice what changes from one piece to the next: a concentration of matter, a shift in colour, a different balance of forms, or the space left for the eye to rest.

This selection is therefore not a technical inventory. It is an invitation to observe how a material language develops through individual works, and how each title, date and surface contributes to the continuing movement of the artist’s painting.