Jean-Louis Tornato – ENSP 1996
Les sommeils
Since 1996, Jean-Louis Tornato has been developing his work around sleep using a camera with an automatic timer, infrared film and a flash. These allow light, which is invisible to the naked eye, to pass, and images to therefore be captured on opaque film while the subjects sleep undisturbed.
The 36 images obtained, a summary of the different emotional states of the sleeping subjects and of cycles during a whole night, are then visible either separately or in the form of contact prints in small sequential groups or synthesised into an image. They capture, from deep within a world concealed from all of us, photographs of sleeping people, gracious or recumbent, engulfed by sheets or floating like the ghostly doubles of their social beings.
Recently, some of these photographs have been associated with two other series, Limbes (Limbo) andIn Between, the fruit of Tornato’s many trips to Japan. Hugely influenced by the monist thinking that permeates the collective unconscious of this country, Tornato mixes two traditions that at first sight seem poles apart: Eastern cosmology made up of connections and of a substantial relationship between all things of this world – breath, mind and matter – and the cosmology of the West, turned to a more conflictual vision of the life space, a political and temporal perception of territories in crisis.
Through the metaphor of limbo, that mythical and dreaded place where the souls of the righteous go wandering for eternity (the eternity of martyrs and unbaptised babies), the series of waves photographed on the sites of shipwrecks or wars (Hiroshima, Arromanches, the beaches devastated by the Erica and the Amoco Cadiz capsizing, etc.) insists on the threats that weighs on our planet, while also exploring history made up of dramas on the sea, the vast binder of our tragedies, an ageless palimpsest and a symbol of a collective repressed unconscious.
The photographs of strange places consisting of waves and smoke (In Between), which Tornato juxtaposes with mysterious faces of dozing beings, try to reproduce the unique perceptions and troubles (falling and weightlessness, dislocation of being) that take hold of us during the various phases of sleep.
Jean-Louis Tornato
Born in 1969 in Brignoles. Lives and works in Paris and Tokyo. Jean-Louis Tornato studied Arts at the University Faculty in Aix-en-Provence until 1993, after which he combined a research Masters in Art Sciences with studies at the ENSP, graduating from the latter in 1996. Since then he has divided his time between artistic research, free lance photography (architecture, cinema, portrait, and trends), and a more theoretical commitment to various domains concerning the image (teaching in art school, lectures and workshops, directing photographic missions on behalf of various local authorities). A monograph of his work was published in 2004 (Les sommeils/Sleepings, 128 pages, 779 Editions) and his work has featured in several collective and individual exhibitions, amongst which: Centre Civic Can Basté, Barcelona; Hôtel-Dieu, Paris; Kawasaki City Museum, Japan; 779 gallery, Paris; Place M gallery, Tokyo; CAPC, Bordeaux; and the Fondation de l’Atelier de Sèvres, Paris. Jean-Louis Tornato’s subject matter includes complex questions about sleep, the unconscious and desire, and he describes worlds in a state of crisis, marked by tragedy, war, catastrophe and pollution.
