"The Love project": a life journey

Thanks for joining me on my artistic journey!

I hope you're all ready for this covid edition of Christmas! A lot of fun in perspective...

So to keep positive, I would like to talk to you about the start of a new series I entitled "The Love Project". For those who have been following me since the launch of this newsletter, you already know that I work in series I conceive as thematic cycles linked by a graphic and conceptual common thread. The more I go, the more series I work on simultaneously (I have four ongoings at this point). But this one is a bit special if only for the emotional charge it has for me. Obviously, all my works somehow relate to me as they are rooted in my own vision of the world, but they were not "autobiographical" until today. I have been working with models (who are also my friends), and while they agree to share a bit of their intimacy with me, I stand on the other side of the camera.

With "The Love Project", I am no longer the one observing. I'm using myself and my most intimate experience as the topic of my work. Here: the man I love and who shares my life. This project began when I realized that I couldn't keep talking about intimate bonds without digging into my own. Intimacy can only be experienced in the first person. So I came to the conclusion that if I wanted to truly talk about love, I could only do it through my own experience of it.

The Love Project: how it started

At the origin of this project is the movie "Love" by French director Gaspar Noë. In this movie, Gaspar Noë tells the passionate, sensual and destructive relationship of the main character Murphy with his ex-girlfriend Electra. Almost the entire movie is a flashback: while Murphy is now in a relationship with another woman and father of her child, he wakes up the day following new year's eve (good timing!) with a voicemail from Electra's mother. This event starts an obsessive train of thinking in Murphy about his past tumultuous love relationship with her. It is as if, months and years after, his body could still replay their sensual encounters in the present.

This is the tour de force this movie accomplishes for me: capturing so accurately the resurgence of past sensorial experiences in the present, how our body remembers what we once felt. And it is exactly what I want to talk about through "The Love Project": the sensorial traces that love relationships leave on our body, and the sensory experience of the person we love. Quite literally having someone "under your skin". Before being a set of behavioral characteristics, the person you love and are intimate with is first and foremost a set of textures, tastes, and smells that you come to cherish on a totally primal level. What French neuropsychiatric Boris came to call the "sensory niche" - in his case to talk about the link between the mother and infant.

First shooting, first works...

While the project emerged in my head about 6 months ago, it was only recently that I finally had my boyfriend sit and pose for me, solo at first, and then together, in my home photo studio - it's a nice weekend activity we have here! For the works of this series, which I subtitled "forever ongoing" (for self-explanatory reasons), I plan to use very close shots as well as an almost hyperrealistic pictorial rendering. I want the works to appeal to the senses and resonate with each viewer's own experience of this instinctual bond we have with the person we love or used to love.