Winner of the Art Collector award in 2017, the photographer Charles Fréger holds a solo exhibition at Patio Opéra in Paris. On this occasion, Charles Fréger presents his latest series, L’Épopée de Jeanne d’Arc, which reprises a theme popular in historical reenactment typical of French collective culture. Previously showcased at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, this series of photographic silhouettes stages the story of the iconic historical figure.
Charles Fréger arrived at the idea of Joan of Arc via stereotypes and exposures, community-building constraints and codifications, and in 2004 began photographing high school students chosen every year to parade “like majorettes,” he says, or rather like mounted majorettes in a suit of armor. Following this initial work, the photographer returned to the iconography of the Maid of Orléans. He drew inspiration from the Basque pastoral tradition where, since the Middle Ages, people have been telling religious and historical epics, reenacted outdoors, against a stretched canvas, by villagers in the Soule province, in the south of France.
This is a dual shadow theater : where the photographer explores the shadowy projections, where nothing seems hidden, since Charles Fréger chooses his models’ costumes and accessories, does their hair, and puts them on stage. The quality of framing, the choice of poses, the details of the sitters’ hands or faces, as well as the focus on the situational context, produce an acute sense of presence, a balance between the person and a universe identified by its codes and its inscription in a society.
Charles Fréger, L’Epopée de Jeanne d’Arc
September 26 to October 7, 2017
Patio Opéra
5 Rue Meyerbeer
75009 Paris
France
