Sylvie Aflalo-Haberberg’s book is a nice surprise. The body exists there. But in a particular dimension. It is not taken for granted as it is subject to a paradoxical exhibition, an implicit devoration and a “mutilation” of identity: the face remains (or almost) hidden.
The takes nevertheless offer an “oscillation” with multiple inputs and movements. And this in a constant tension between breath and choking. The portrait becomes the display of confusion and anger. The body twists, gives itself, dilutes in the shadow, in a certain call, but also the fear of emptiness. The one to fill and that does not leave unhurt.
The book becomes an avowed confession, an unveiling, the rise of a tide, but paradoxically when a reflux takes place. He is also the one of the secrets of an eros more than ever enraptured, because terrible and fleeing. It brings out of oneself while allowing oneself to become captive and carried away.
Nothing can resist the hope that the expected pleasure cannot give. Gravity and weightlessness, light and darkness mingle in a forced bath, a ceremony of confessions, a carnal choreography.
Everything plays between emptiness and fullness where silence is shown in a sensuality as powerful as allusive. The woman disappears, like a ghost that brings back to the shadows and radiates a powerful aura between the loss and the recovery.
Everyone can ask if we should see in this movement the effect of a death drive. But the abyss of nothingness is blocked by the force of images, where yet the vision seems to be subjected to a form of hindrance or impossibility. Rarely the photograph reaches this force of solitude and vibration.
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
Book
Sylvie Aflalo-Haberberg, “Ce que tu me vois”
Paris, 2019
140 pages
photos accompanied by texts by Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret, 29 €
On sale at the Librairie Tschann – 125 bd du Montparnasse – 75006 Paris
A signature will be held at the Librairie Tschann – 125 bld Montparnasse – 75006 Paris on Sunday, May 12, 2019 at 15:30
Exhibition
April 13 to 27, 2019
ROBERTARTROOM
99 bd Saint Michel
75005 Paris
Code 6182B
