Olivier Metzger – ENSP 2004
Smile (forever)
Evocative smiles firmly outlined on glacial and ambivalent pouting lips. She wants to live as though she were twenty years younger. In search of renewed youthfulness, she is as old as the other’s gaze makes her. Vivacious and wanting, tinged with artifice but without making the mistake of pathetic surgery and frozen narcissism, time seems to slide on her smile in a consumerist display, assumed and henceforth permitted.
She is one of those active women who, in their pomp, endorse a new surge of vitality and come to question the notion of identity. These women must in fact invent their new lives. They have no reference framework because ‘those who preceded them were already “old” at this age, or had already passed away’ (Danièle Laufer, Femmes Vintages, Éditions Michel Lafon). New figures, creatures, it is therefore up to them to invent their role in our society on the move.
Between a new kind of documentary and fictional narrative, we follow a complex and endearing character who leads us to her favourite haunts, now become scenery, in Europe or on the other side of the Atlantic. She leads us in her wake as images of daytime scenes and nocturnal tableaux go by, from her intimate sphere to public spaces where she appears, exposes herself and tries to find herself in an ultimate confrontation, delivered up to the spectator.
Olivier Metzger
Born in 1973 in Mulhouse. Lives and works in Arles. After a nursing career in public hospitals, Metzger studied photography at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles and graduated in 2004.That same year, his Data series earned him the Prix Voies Off at Les Rencontres d’Arles. He was then awarded the BMW Special Prize for his Nightshot series in 2008. We also note his nomination for the Prix Découverte at the 2009 Rencontres and the Prix Lacoste in 2012. He has participated in numerous collective and personal exhibitions, among which those that took place at the Château d’Eau gallery in Toulouse in 2005, La Filature in Mulhouse in 2005 and 2008, the Rencontres d’Arles 2005 and 2009, the Moscow House of Photography in 2010, Fondation Hermès in Bern in 2011, along with the latest editions of Paris Photo and the FIAC. Also of note, Metzger’s forays into applied photography with various realisations of public and private commissions, along with the creation of publicity campaigns and portraits for the press. He is represented by the Bertrand Grimont gallery.
