To mark the start of his collaboration with Galerie Templon, American photographer David LaChapelle presents two radical series for the first time in France: the previously unseen Last Supper and Still Life.
David LaChapelle, world-renowned for his colorful fashion photography and baroque celebrity stagings, is surprising us with a new direction that highlights his dual interest in the other side of the American dream and art history. Informed of acts of vandalism perpetrated at the Dublin Wax Museum, David LaChapelle, an icon hunter obsessed with the question of notoriety, went to document these broken look-alikes, and continued his investigation at other museums in the USA, California and Nevada.
The highlight of these series is a new photographic fresco reinterpreting Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Staged in cardboard boxes, the floating severed heads of Jesus, Mary and the apostles, accompanied by severed but expressive hands, precisely recompose the masterpiece in its contemporary version. The fragments of mannequins offer a raw vision of piety, resonating strangely with Christian iconography of martyrdom. The biblical wax mannequins have been spared vandalism, unlike those in the Still Life series (presented at Impasse Beaubourg). The photographs show deformed wax celebrities, from Leonardo di Caprio and John Kennedy to Madonna and Lady Diana. The hyper-realistic rendering of the images gives these damaged artifacts, forgotten dolls, an authentic aspect that is all the more disturbing given that David LaChapelle has often photographed living models, magnifying their conquering plasticity.
The Still Lives are on the dark side of pop culture. A reflection on the fragility of celebrity and the power of the Hollywood system, the series questions our attraction to replicas and look-alikes. These human ‘still lifes’, with their broken faces, reflect our fascination with the spectacle of the decline of once-adored heroes. With these frightening portraits, David LaChapelle revisits our archetypal figures with humanity.
The exhibition will run from June 06 to July 27, 2013 at Galerie Daniel Templon 30 rue Beaubourg in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris.
www.danieltemplon.com
Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)
