Fotokino

This collective show brought together three very different artists, who share a common sensibility to the theme of strangeness. It gathered photographs, drawings, engravings, objects and films, inviting the visitor to enter a peculiar and wild territory.

Charles Fréger is a photographer who for the past twelve years has been building up an astounding photographic inventory on the theme of uniforms. Sportsmen, soldiers, workers, men and women are considered through the prism of their clothing, their second skin. He has recently undertaken an amazing search for folk costumes worn by men all over Europe, from France to Bulgaria, Finland to Sardinia, through Greece and Germany, during celebratory ceremonies, a tradition which has lived on for several hundreds of years. By taking on the appearance of bears, goats, deers or boars, by transforming themselves into straw men, devils or monster with steel jaws, these men celebrate the cycles of life and seasons, literally turning themselves into “wild” men.

Muriel Moreau is first and foremost an engraver. She masters the art of etching in a very personal way, intertwining plant motifs and organic shapes in a symbiosis that brings to mind Leonardo da Vinci’s words : “The body of the earth is criss-crossed by a network of veins, all joined together.” Her engravings evoke both animals’ bodies and the unlikely cartography of a primitive territory. She pursues her questioning in farcical films where borders between the human, the animal and the natural fade away for good. She appears in these films, dressed in plain garments and wearing masks unrelated to any specific animal or botanical shape.

These boundaries are just as blurred in Karine Rougier’s work. Her miniature-like drawings tangle up uncertain worlds, where strangeness and gentleness stand side by side, and dreams seem seeped with uneasiness. The depicted scenes constantly plunge us into new perceptions, and instill new feelings and questions, heightened by a specific detail which catches our eye. The theme of the mask, as a face hiding another face, is evidently present in her work, as a motif from childhood, an accessory to secret rituals, but also as a metaphor for her own drawings, constantly spinning new stories.