Inspired by works belonging to the world of art history that have accompanied me since adolescence, this particular bond is like that of a family of souls whose invisible family tree whispers to me to draw it. This purpose is carried out as follows: compose a setting, stylize the models, illuminate, and guide the subject in front of my lens. Photograph and work in post-production on digital files up to the prints. And finally exhibit these works as a revelation of sensitive identities. My creation and my research are held there, in a portrait theme that I call “Portraits of souls”.
Through a wild cast, my quest as a portraitist is turned towards people in whom I perceive a certain nobility they themselves ignore. As well as a gleam and a resemblance to models from the history of art. I apply myself to a fluid guidance of the models towards their artistic potential. My practice is part of the artistic and social field. All about sharing.
Delphine Tomaselli
To Delphine Tomaselli,
Delphine Tomaselli defines herself as a portraitist of photography. In the era of the selfie, her work re-establish the prestige of the art of portrait.
Being a portraitist is above all an encounter, she tells us, an encounter with the other, stimulating her imagination, inspiring her artistic eye.
Spontaneous or sought, the gesture is never trivial and the portrait never prosaic. The image is composed like a musical score, what is given to see plays between the visible and the invisible, a phenomenology of perception.
Delphine Tomaselli goes beyond the contingencies of the image to offer us the duplication of Beauty and of the Unexpected. This perspective towards a dreamlike frame where the portrait is never fixed in an identity, frees itself from its limits, reveals an infinity of possibilities, a kaleidoscope of images oscillating between the real and the unreal, beauty and the subliminal, the past and the present.
If “portrait” is made up of the intensive “for” and the verb “to shoot”, the artist never shoots the portrait of her models but dresses them in a myriad of pictorial stories that are part of a rereading of the history of art and an original creation.
Art serves as a reference for stagings that re-sacralize the portrait. In her way of photographing, she paints with the light of her lens and the soul of her models.
Melanie Grasset
Delphine Tomaselli : Portraits of Souls
Until December 29, 2022.
40 avenue Francois Bougouin
441510 The Pouliguen, France
