One day, the painters became photographers. With Fabien Dettori, painting and photography caress each other, interpenetrate each other and fecundate each other, releasing one into the other of paintings where the vivid plays with duration. Where the duration captures the snapshot of the poses. The bodies, the faces illuminate the shadow from which they are detached, without really leaving it. Impregnated with darkness, fragile border between inside and outside, the bare skin seems to hesitate between the soul and the body. Neither sun nor moon. The absent sky. As if the light did not come from outside, but from the interior of the subjects. On Dettori’s photographic canvases, nudity is a glimmer. The colors, the detailed layout are reminiscent of the Venetian painting of the quattrocento. The shadows that shape the architecture of the body: joints, bone structure, veins pose a concern on the full or folds of buttocks, a hip, a shoulder, a hand, more luminous and sensual.
Ineluctably, the carnal absorbs light and heat, almost to the point of making them disappear, revealing the death to which it is doomed. The flesh is as bereaved, clothed in crepe, covered with ashes. Humanity, worked by a subtle alliance of shade and color, line and flesh, idea and matter, is revealed in the anxious eye of the artist as a metaphysical question. The quest for the capture of the living, the photographer’s paradox of constantly assigning the movement is expressed in Dettori in writing that is a latent skin deep violence. The reflection of the author, like that of light, trembles for the mortal destiny of man. And makes it the drawing and the aim. The flesh seems pensive. We would sometime sometimes brush the still life. If it was not a sheet of sweat barely golden: life? The soul? A hope? Especially since the subjects thrilled by the objective are essentially female. Birth belly. mortal and desired dens . Intimacy of ochres, amber and shadows; uterine inks whose photographic brush Fabien Dettori seems to have made his living matter.
Anna Maria Caroline Celli
Memories, Collective Exhibition: Thierry Urbain, Fabien Dettori and Thibaud Yevnine
November 15 – December 22, 2018
Thierry Bigaignon Gallery
9 Charlot Street
75003 Paris
