I“I don’t like photographs to be too explicit, I prefer them to be wrapped in beauty and mystery,” confesses Paolo Roversi in a recently published correspondence with Emanuele Coccia. The colourful, dull, mysteriously oscillating images that the Parisian-born Ravenna artist has been creating for almost half a century are indeed aesthetically pleasing and strange. If one wanted to situate the artist against the backdrop of old debates in his field, he would be more Rubens than Poussin, more pictorialist than documentarian. And a monomaniac at that: his work – apart from a series about his studio in the city of lights and a second about birds – consists almost exclusively of fashion photographs. More precisely: from portraits of female models created in the studio.
Bright brush strokes with a flashlight
Around a hundred of these images – plus a handful of shots of interiors, animals or men like John Galliano, Peter Lindbergh or himself – are now brought together in a wondrous exhibition by the Palais Galliera, the fashion museum of the city of Paris. Everything here invites you to immerse yourself in a quasi-meditative way. The chiaroscuro in which the simultaneously magnificent and intimate series of rooms with their Pompeian red walls is immersed reflects that of the exhibits, on which spots appear in a way mise en abyme Distribute light and shadow irregularly.
Painting with light is, literally, one of Roversi's stylistic characteristics: the photographer likes to move the (sometimes colorfully tinted) beam of a flashlight over the body of his model, which, with long exposure times of ten or more seconds, creates an effect like glowing brush strokes. Other experiments include applying fine silver or gold leaves, pressed flowers or wafer-thin pieces of paper to the film, creating sepia-colored “vintage images” by developing color film in a black-and-white bath, and photographing analogue black-and-white images with a old wooden camera into which Roversi loads the Polacolor film he loves so much, but to his chagrin has no longer been produced since 2008.
Here, the technology is merely a means to an end. This is: alienation, transformation, enchantment. Roversi's fashion photographs – for houses such as Alaïa, Armani, Jean Paul Gaultier, Yves Saint Laurent, but especially Romeo Gigli, Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons – do not focus on outfits. Rather, they create poetic visions, suggestive dream visions that surround even uncompromisingly radical creations like those by Rei Kawakubo with an aura of seduction and fragility. In these shots, contours blur, shadows multiply, colors fade or burn out, and the lens, like Vermeer's brush, exploits the play between focused foreground and dull background.
Very familiar with old paintings, the Italian repeatedly alludes to specific paintings in the poses of his models. Above all, however, the ingenious, quasi-sculptural light treatment allows the bodies and faces of Roversi's muses – at least Saskia de Brauw, Audrey Marnay, Kirsten Owen, Guinevere van Seenus, Stella Tennant and Natalja Wodjanowa – to stand out with an unrivaled intensity. Not to mention the intensity of her gaze: Vodjanova's piercing eyes in a series from 2003 literally freeze the viewer, like a rabbit caught in the headlights. The exhibition catalog, in which the exhibits are printed full or double-sided on high-quality Munken Pure natural paper, gives an impression of the stupendous quality of Roversi's prints.
He never resorts to banal fashion photography
It's easy to forget that this is about fashion. The outfits that form the pretext and financing of the shoots usually fade into the background. From the depths of commerce, Roversi takes his creations into the sphere of art; What was once short-lived because it was subject to the fashion calendar has long since seemed timeless. One does not want to use the adjective “immortal” here, as the creator expresses his understanding of it in one of the letters mentioned at the beginning tempus fotograficus but to the point as follows: “The past captured in the picture is a kind of suspended time that becomes a continued present in the viewer’s gaze. The time that can be photographed is always and exclusively the present, which good photography transforms into a continuous present, a kind of small eternity. By swallowing the past, photography stretches and expands the present.” In this sense, one could attest to Roversi’s oeuvre having a small eternal value.
Paolo Roversi. Palais Galliera, Paris; until July 14th. The catalog costs 45 euros.
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