L’EPOPEE DE JEANNE D’ARC

All over the world, the artist is interested in outfits and uniforms, in the way the individual and differences can be expressed within a homogeneous group, such as the military or sportsmen. This seemingly documentary approach masks an extreme attention to detail and a photographic vocabulary that follows a certain number of formal principles: tight framing, often frontal, neutrality of expression, static position of the individual represented.

L’Epopée de Jeanne d’Arc, an unpublished series of 15 photographs made in 2016, renews the artist’s way of working. If the attention to framing, the choice of poses, the eloquence of details and attributes and the importance given to the setting are characteristics found in his previous series, this set of photos has nothing of the frontality and colors proper to older series.

In these photographs, a model poses in the Abbey of Saint-Ouen in Rouen in front of a stretched cloth that is lit from the back: only her silhouette is therefore visible against the light. It is the attributes – the lamb, the cross, the chains, the armor – and the evocative poses that allow us to identify a figure that is part of the history of the city of Rouen: Joan of Arc. On foot or on horseback, in armor or in chains, carrying a standard or a sword, wounded by an arrow or wearing the artifice of a halo, this Joan of Arc is in turn hieratic or disheveled, sculptural and warlike, bringing the iconography of the virgin into the 21st century.