The Liberty of Confinement

​

From constraint is born a new liberty: the ability to explore new borders.

Being quarantined does not mean curling up, but rather overcoming an imposed routine. Thinking and doing with what we already have, beginning a new project of another spectrum (le Contretype.)
In a limited space, due to confinement, I decided to experiment with a new material, a new facade of my passion for portraits.
Discovering what a face can reveal; "the face speaks,"wrote Levinas.
The lenient weather allowed me to discover the never-ending possibilities of cyanotypie. A negative placed on paper with one revealing factor... the light of day and its variations.
Taken by surprise by this brutal change of lifestyle in early March, I only had one enlarged negative with me, fortunately shot just days before quarantine. 

Cyanotypie emits a poetic force due to the random combinations of different elements implemented along the printing process: beginning by the shoot and the development of the negative, the application of the chemical products, the infinite combinations on paper, the intensity of the UV rays, the time of exposition, and the association of the photogram...
So many criteria which offer a face the possibility of communication; something different in each print, despite the use of a single negative.
Every print is unique, and by its artisanal implementation, it is evidently not duplicable, hence becoming an artistic pictural expression.
Therefore, a young woman from Burundi, encountered by chance in Brussels, allowed me to work for two months on the expressions of her traits, fixed on a single negative.
Outside of her intense gaze, her traits and expression only give a small indication of her 'mood.' It is therefore, by playing with the multiple tools of cyanotypie, and evidently using my own 'mood' of the moment, I was able to give her face different narratives through this creative process. 

​

Within each print, a new dialogue begins; a new conversation in a new scene.