Laurent Lafolie, Clément Mitéran – Échos des visages

Opening: 23 October at 6,30 p.m.
Curated by Giovanni Gardini e Michel Poivert. Èchos des visages is an exhibition that seeks to bring together the work of Clément Mitéran and Laurent Lafolie. The dialogue proposed between the two artists offers an opportunity to present some of the most current approaches in contemporary photography: a photography “expanded” to include unprecedented skills in the field of the image.
By taking control of space with sometimes spectacular installations, Laurent Lafolie transforms the art of portraiture into a poetics of faces. Printing images on extremely fragile and almost transparent supports, and playing with the presence of the viewer whose gaze both observes and passes through the images, Lafolie restores perception to its sensitive dimension.
With Clément Mitéran, a mosaicist, photographic impression interacts with the composition of tesserae as units of images — a kind of materialized “pixels” — before which the observer experiences the act of seeing by reassembling the image, while remaining aware of its materiality. It is precisely the modes of appearance of the image that the artistic practices of Clément Mitéran and Laurent Lafolie bring into play. What is scarcely perceptible becomes the very place of the experience of discernment. The more photography is materialized here, the more the image turns spectral: this is the great dialectic of a contemporary analogue culture. What we are given to recognize as a physical experience sometimes becomes the occasion for an encounter with the invisible. The exhibition is held in collaboration with the French association MuPa.