Galerie Hors-Champs presents Rafael Gray and Ari Rossner
Rafael Gray and Ari Rossner work on beauty as a cultural institution, adding to the task of the “beauty” photographer a distance from which to analyze this normative culture.
In both cases, this distancing is achieved through painting, i.e., to the act of freezing or selecting a figure subject to the diktats of seduction, they respond with the freedom of the pictorial gesture, often violent or deliberately “coarse”.
The initial function of fashion or beauty photography is to meticulously sanitize the body. The aim is to remove the flesh, leaving only its ideal – and with it the ideals that will be indiscriminately associated with it: the ideal of youth, desire, luxury, etc…. These ideals are utopias, necessarily out of reach, since it is by erasing what flesh contains of reality, its substance, that they can flourish.
Rafael Gray and Ari Rossner’s jets of paint or ink take on the role of a second skin. They invade these perfect faces and bodies, adding instinctive gesture to their statuesque eroticism, and material and texture to their smooth sensuality. The original intentions, their utilitarian process, are then revealed and finally disturbed. In the erasure of their features, and the loss of representational reference points, these intentions are transformed into a search that is as much sensory as it is critical.
Hijacking the photographic process is at the very heart of Ari Rossner’s approach. In the printing industry, the process of transferring an image to paper involves the transfer of an offset (aluminum) plate. He interrupts this production chain to focus on the ink- and paint-coated plate – the usual residue of industrial processing – and uses it as the definitive support for his image, which he then reworks.
The effect of this technique, which at first glance consists of a mastery of chance, is that of a new breath of life. For Ari Rossner, beauty seems to be linked to incompleteness, to the unexpected, to what at last, in his cold fashion prints, appeals to an all-too-human fragility. And it is through this that his photographs breathe, and are embodied as if they were the structure of a body waiting for a skin to articulate itself.
Alongside Ari Rossner’s pictorial outlet, Rafael Gray approaches his compositions with the aim of elaborating a whole iconography of signs. They function like a game of associations, on different levels: firstly, the images themselves, then the traces of paint he adds, which still bear witness to his excursion into street art. These associations re-read the posters and press photos he has picked up on his travels, this time taking in their attractive faces and, through the use of silkscreen, modulating their registers ad infinitum.
His choice of silk-screen printing raises questions about beauty as mass production. His “3 Graces” series, for example, experiments with the faces of 3 women whose features Rafael Gray simplifies to retain only their main seductive assets, and which acrylic adorns to take them from gentleness to violence, from erotic mystery to indifference. They are a standard of beauty that, from the same, never ceases to become other.
Last but not least, the sign appears in the traces left by the spray can. As in graffiti, these traces seem to contain a discourse (advertising?), a signature whose meaning is unknown. In the “2 photogrammes de Marie” series, they confront their rough texture, lines and directions with Marie’s body, which thus becomes a “banner”. But, like Ari Rossner, Rafael Gray only suggests a critical statement that he does not formulate, preferring to use poetry to extract its roots.
Curating : Hannibal Volkoff
Exhibition from November 22, 2011 to January 17, 2012
Opening November 22 from 6 to 9 p.m.
Galerie Hors-Champs
13 rue de Thorigny 75003 Paris
06 66 87 83 05
06 64 11 17 41
Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)
