Open Home #4

SUZANNE BREZA is an artist photographer. She works and lives in Paris. Through portraits, collages and illustrations her work proposes games of temporality. In search of materials and colors she is interested in the notions of chronology, beginning and legibility. Public spaces, fabrics, nature and movement are recurring motifs. It is at the Gobelins school that she decides to professionalize her practice around the portrait. Collage works (Arles exhibition 6-27 April 2018), the self-publication of a booklet “tell me when it begins”, an exploration of theater (“in between” Prague and Geneva 2017-this day) and a work with Tidjane Hydara (“LGD” 2018) allow her to explore the portrait in immersion and in studio. The artist has also coordinated advertising photography productions and written four art-house scripts (shot in Paris, NY and Geneva between 1996-2000).

LOUISE DUMONT born in 1990 in Guéret, lives and works in Paris. Member of the Action Hybride collective. She is a lacquer artist and graduate of Ensaama. She works with her eye and her hands, colors and effects, depth and brilliance, sensuality and richness. If her profession consists in restoring Asian antiques, her photography could allude to the Japanese technique which, by sublimating the cracks of ceramics through a visible and ornamental repair using lacquer and gold powder, enhances their stories. A symbol and metaphor for resilience, the art of kintsugi invites us to recognize the beauty that lies in simple, imperfect, and atypical things. Sensitive to the work of Antoine d’Agata, Berlinde de Bruyckere and Francis Bacon, the body – naked, raw – is at the heart of his photographic motif. Flesh as matter and shadow to sculpt. Louise Dumont scrutinizes, cuts, details, highlights epidermal particularities, that some would call imperfections; scars, cellulite, stretch marks, wrinkles, hematomas, ephelides… By getting as close as possible and/or by upsetting the original reading of the image, she likes to tend towards abstraction. Desire that the eye gets confused, gets lost in a mass of tissues, muscles and fats, that the organs become indefinable and the gender imprecise.

With her faceless bodies, creatures with their own shapes and colors, fleshy or skeletal, titanic, flexible and bruised, with opaline or golden skin, she creates a kind of universal identity, a common body in which everyone can project themselves. A body with a thousand stories. The flesh exposed, photographed, noem of the “that-was”, is also a poetic guarantor of equality in front of death, like a memento mori.

Rarely practiced with uncovered face, the self-portrait is recurrent in her work. She uses processes such as masks, make-up-camouflage, textures. This exercise is often characterized by a game of chance and metamorphosis. This alchemy between dance and stroboscopic light – which allows her to capture movement on the fly and thus multiply her “selves” -, calculations and abandonment, spontaneity and patience, resounds like a kind of transcendence, an almost immaterial vestige of her earthly passage. His images have been included in group exhibitions in France and abroad, notably in Paris, Berlin, Dublin, Livorno, Venice, and Illinois alongside works by artists such as H.R. Giger and David Lynch.

PIXELSAB has many strings to her bow. Specialized educator and manager of a structure for disabled people, she is also an amateur actress, model and photographer. She is a person committed to the most disadvantaged. Through her work, she accompanies vulnerable people (handicapped, autistic, suffering from psychological disorders, homeless…) in accessing their rights. Precariousness, discrimination and exclusion are part of her daily work that she wishes to make visible through her art.

It was in 2018 that she photographed her first demonstration “against Violence against women”. The artist believes that photography is an encounter with the Other, it serves as a testimony against oblivion. It allows her to tell a story, to denounce, to defend a cause and to give meaning.
For PixelSab, being a photographer means being master of the moment, capturing an emotion, a look. Those who inspire her the most are those that no one wants to see: the excluded, the marginalized, the homeless, the “crazy”, the “disabled”. Through her pictures, she wishes to bring the voice of those who have no more and to put in light these forgotten people.

JEAN-PIERRE VIGUIÉ Since the end of the 1970’s, his camera has never left him. In 1982, he graduated from IDHEC (Institut Des Hautes Études Cinématographiques). Until 2008, he worked in film and documentary production for television, cinema and all kinds of public and private sponsors. He has directed, edited and produced programs of all kinds. Dozens and dozens of hours of images, animated and sound… During all these years, he continues to photograph obstinately and relentlessly, every week, every day, without showing anyone a single one of the thousands of images of this solitary and secret work. In 2005, he launched his website “www.boischarbon.fr”, presenting for the first time his work as a photographer. In 2008, he decides to dedicate himself only to photography. In 2009, he organizes his first solo exhibition of photographs in Paris and publishes his first book after a trip to Japan. Since then, he continues this long term photographic project which develops in particular in the books that he regularly publishes. He was born in 1957 and lives in Paris.