La Forest Divonne Gallery presents the new photographic series by Elsa & Johanna, entitled “Séquences”.
This exhibition comes at a particularly busy time for the artists. Following their citywide installations for “Un été au Havre”, invited by Gaël Charbau, and their major solo exhibition at the Centre Photographique de Marseille last summer, their monumental photographic work will soon be unveiled at Champigny train station, as laureates of the “Tandem” program of the Grand Paris Express.
With “Séquences”, Elsa and Johanna open a new chapter in their photographic practice, making the landscape a protagonist in its own right. During a residency at Moulin Blanchard in the Perche region, and more specifically near the Bellême forest, the talented duo produced this new series, inspired by the lines, contours, and chromatic variations of the landscape. They returned in the summer to construct their shots, when the light intensifies and the colors reach their full saturation.
Their working method, which has become their artistic signature, relies on a rigorous and narrative staging, where each image is conceived as a painting that tells a story: carefully chosen settings, subtle mastery of natural light effects, precise clothing and accessories, and the presence of bodies and poses meticulously composed by Elsa and Johanna, who play all the characters in their photographic fictions. Here, the artists fully integrate the landscape into their visual vocabulary, transforming fields, forest edges, and rolling roads into almost cinematic, mental scenes. The Percheron territory—agricultural, wooded, undulating—becomes a pictorial surface on which sequences unfold with pop-infused accents, sometimes crossed by a subtle, mysterious tension.
According to Elsa & Johanna: “This play between reality and imagination is a delightful balance: opening a door to an imaginary world, immersing ourselves in it for hours, and then returning to reality while integrating fragments of fiction.”
Color occupies a central place in this series, treated as a painter would with a palette. It dialogues with the tradition of American and European painting, evoking both the silent, laboring figures of Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners and the introspective landscapes of Andrew Wyeth, as well as the suspended atmospheres of Edward Hopper. Cinematic references also fuel their inspiration: the muted strangeness of David Lynch, the formal rigor and palette of Wes Anderson, the Hitchcockian tension of North by Northwest, the controlled dramaturgy of Sam Mendes, the contemplative restraint of Peter Weir, and the grand classic epics of John Huston’s narratives.
Between painting and cinema, Séquences unfolds like a contemporary fresco, where the landscape becomes a mirror of inner states. Elsa and Johanna invent a world that is both familiar and unsettling, where each image seems to anticipate the next, like successive shots in a film or fragments of a story written from one image to the next.
This is the sixth exhibition that Galerie La Forest Divonne has devoted to them, across its Paris and Brussels spaces. The gallery has also presented them at numerous art fairs, including Expo Chicago, Art Paris, and Paris Photo.
La Forest Divonne Gallery has represented the work of Elsa & Johanna since 2017.
Elsa Parra (born 1990) and Johanna Benaïnous (born 1991) have been collaborating since 2014 under the name of the duo Elsa & Johanna.
Working at the crossroads of photography, performance and video, they have been creating visual narratives since their meeting, of which they are the interpreters. The use of autofiction, at the heart of Elsa & Johanna’s work, allows them to stage characters freed from their own identity, questioning the contemporary individual, the notions of self-representation and anonymity.
Their work has been exhibited at the Salon de Montrouge (2016), the MAC/VAL, Paris Photo and the Festival d’Hyères (2019). In 2020, they are finalists for the Prix Découverte Louis Roederer at the Rencontres d’Arles, they are part of the Société Générale Contemporary Art Collection, they are commissioned by the Palais de la Découverte and they are part of the exhibition «Staging Identity» at the MathildenhöheInstitut in Darmstadt alongside Pipilotti Rist and Cindy Shermann.
Their photographs are part of the collections of the CNAP, the Fond d’Acquisition d’Art Contemporain de la ville de Paris and the Société Générale, among others.
In 2021, the artists hold their first retrospective exhibition entitled «The plural life of identity» at the Städtische Galerie in Karlsruhe, Germany. In 2022 Elsa & Johanna open the Season at the MEP Studio in Paris with an exhibition dedicated to their latest project «The Timeless Story of Moormerland», produced in Germany.
Their photographs are included, among others, in the collections of the CNAP, the Fonds d’Art Contemporain – Paris Collections, the Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, and Société Générale.
Elsa & Johanna : Séquences
March 5 – April 11, 2026
Galerie La Forest Divonne
12 Rue des Beaux Arts
75006 Paris, France
www.galerielaforestdivonne.com
