Photography Exhibition Arles 2023: Etienne Renzo – Ordinary Angels

Ordinary angels exist. Etienne Renzo has seen and photographed them. His angels are both feminine and masculine, earthly and celestial.They are part of a little-seen photography that needs to be discovered.

Etienne Renzo has been photographing body and soul since the mid-70s. He has developed a singular practice while working as a professional photographer, farmer, airplane pilot, mechanic and company director. He has also worked as a foundryman and local councillor.

This atypical background has enabled him to develop photography of real technical and aesthetic quality, both in silver and digital, particularly for portraits. A photography that touches the deepest essence of bodies and souls. Particularly with nudes in nature, where the human merges with the non-human animal, mineral or plant.

Etienne Renzo is also interested in muses, nature spirits and people’s auras. In this way, he has become a photographer of the dual visible and invisible nature of things.

Invisible, too, because his career has taken place in relative artistic isolation.This has enabled him to create a singular, sincere and native poetics in contact with the earth, animals and the air.This is reflected in the two series of images of shepherdesses and angels, which he has chosen to present in conjunction.

The photographs of bodies immersed in a natural environment, and of nude shepherdesses accompanying their flocks of sheep or pigs, originate from agricultural and land-based experiences. Captured in their simplest form, like their naked, naked animals, the shepherdesses are equals with their flock.There’s something bucolic and mythical about these images, but also ecological and erotic in their femininity. For Etienne Renzo, shepherdesses are also «to be seen as muses and intermediaries with the invisible of mythological space, through their closeness to their animals».

In the photographer’s work, as in his exhibition, shepherdesses pave the way for angels. But Etienne Renzo’s levitating angels are very real, and fly less high than those of Wim Wenders. They are also portraits of human beings who, above all, make «good people» sacred. Or fair- minded souls. Ordinary angels, as it were.

Through these two portrait series, which bridge the earthly and the celestial, Etienne Renzo’s photography reveals itself to be particularly emblematic of the challenges of reconnecting with nature and the human being, to which civilization must respond without further delay.That’s why it has a rightful place in today’s image landscape, as a means of reconnecting with the profound nature of things, bodies and souls.

Pascal Pique, Le Musée de l’Invisible

More informations

www.etiennerenzo.com