It’s a nice story: a weekend Eye of Photography portfolio noticed by an American gallery becomes an exhibition. This just happened to Baptiste Léonne. The gallery is Novado Gallery, in New Jersey, where he is exhibiting through May 10th.
Baptiste Léonne is a freelance, self-taught photographer living in Paris. He began his career as a musician, and it was during his tours that he made his first pictures.
From then on, he always had his camera with him . In his pictures, photographer Baptiste Léonne captures the intensity and the poetic charm that naturally emanates from women. Here we mainly see portraits of women, gazes imbued with intense emotion.
We also find, in the tint, light, and paint design on the mirror, an aesthetic and softness from another time, like the nostalgia of a woman who no longer really exists.
Baptiste Léonne thus found in the female body ultimate beauty, the most irrepressible and provocative in the world. It’s nature is its most transcendent form. In his series Hôtel-girls, beauty becomes nature, far away from all vulgarity and eroticism, a form of art.
His series Diva is yet another way to apprehend photography. He approaches it like a painting. We see different women, each unique in their play of colors, reflections, and pigments, but who, in the end, resemble each other in their grace and beauty.
The painting in his photographs dress these women and give us a skillful mixture of simplicity and sophistication worthy of the biggest divas. The mirror is absorbed in the work and becomes both the image and the subject. It is, in extremely legible writing, like the light setting in an intimate scene, secret and sacred on a black background. We guess that each of his models still hides a part of their splendor and seductive femininity.
Véronique Adraï
Véronique Adraï is the director of Courcelles Art Contemporain, in Paris, France.
Baptiste Léonne
Novado Gallery
110 Morgan Street
Jersey City, NJ 07302
USA
