DEUX OU TROIS CHOSES QUE JE SAIS D'ELLE

DUO SHOW : ADRIEN COUVRAT / PAYRAM

This exhibition presents a face-to-face encounter between the artworks of Iranian photograph Payram (b. 1959) and french painter Adrien Couvrat (b. 198). Behind the « sfumato » of the gaze, the artworks surprisingly intersect in a reflection on the portrait, the image and the medium.

Payram, a silver photo technique specialist, proposes for the first time experiments with color, using used film: some black and white negatives, exposed in the 90s, voluntarily unwashed, unfixed, and printed today on color silver paper. Blurred portraits emerge in which forms and colors engage in a dialogue between the image’s destruction and construction. For the first time also, transfers of altered Polaroid 79 color invite us, through portraits-bouquets diptychs in the bath of pigments until devouring the representation.

Adrien Couvrat adresses tportrait in a new way, without denying his own pictorial technique that allows him to put forward his research on light and interference. He thus keeps the idea of "presence", that of the body and of a light linked to ecstasy. As with Payram, Adrien Couvrat's portraits are linked to history: personal, of course, political at times, but also the great History, the History of Art and especially of sculpture. The enigmatic looks of these foreign models are portraits of agony or ecstasy (whether religious or sensual), of horror or pleasure, summoning both exaltation and lamentation. Finally it is, as for Payram, always close to a "vision" of light and its contrasts...