There are encounters that leave their mark and the one with Vincent Edmond Louis is one of them. From this meeting during his exhibition “Connus/Inconnus” at the Galerie de l’Europe, I keep a very present memory of a conversation where he spoke to me about his own.
Vincent Edmond Louis, a young artist born in Nîmes and living in Miami, is a nomad travelling the world. After completing his studies at Parsons School of Design, Vincent Edmond Luis became a photographer’s assistant and then a set photographer where he immortalized actors and famous artists on glossy paper. His portraits appeared in Q Magazine, The Source Magazine. or are found on CD covers.
From these travels, the artist brings back portraits of famous or not so famous people as souvenirs of people who counted or not. But far from being satisfied with the original portrait, Vincent chooses to tell the story of the encounter, sometimes letting the image say, with great modesty, what his words choose to keep silent. He tells with words the meeting or an intense moment shared, and his words applied on the outlines of the portraits transform these snapshots into paintings.
The photograph then becomes malleable, he becomes completely master of it to leave his emotion, his sensations and what he chose to keep of his shared moments. On a bike in Nothing Hill, his words follow the frame of a bike alone. Reading the words becomes a journey where each sentence becomes a pedal stroke and we take this bike to visit his memory.
The colors are primary but strong, yellow, blue and red mark out a flamboyant course. And then we read his photographs as we would read a diary when we do not have all the keys…
From a very young age, Vincent Edmond Louis has traveled with a camera, as on his first trip to India, when he was only 12 years old. On his return, he compares the sensations he experienced, the resulting images and the story he has left behind: “The reason I paint and write on my photos comes from the moments I spent with my Vietnamese grandmother. Every time we looked at photo albums or dug into a shoebox full of photos, we had to turn the image to read when it was taken, who was pictured, and thus bring the memories to life. So I thought I should write about the front of the photograph. Since my photographs were twenty times larger than those of years gone by, I had the space I needed to
write comments, and tell a story.”
Her moments of life marked and fascinated me, I entered her world, I followed her sensibility and mine told me what hers kept silent out of modesty. And finally, he is the one we meet through his encounters, but he doesn’t dare to admit it…
Photo credits: © Vincent Edmond Louis with the courtesy of Galerie de l’Europe
Galerie de l’Europe
55 rue de Seine
75006 Paris
http://www.galerie-europe.com/
Marie-Odile Radom
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