Continuing its collaboration with the young French photographer, Galerie XII Paris presents Ravissements (Enchantments), Charlotte Mano‘s first solo exhibition in Paris.
Winner of the HSBC Prize for Photography in 2020 with the project Thank You Mum, Charlotte Mano has been pursuing prolific research and experimentation around the photographic medium for several years now. While the essence of the image is to show, the young visual artist tries to explore new possibilities with a permanent concern for invention.
For this first solo show in Paris, Galerie XII has selected a set of works from the series Portraire (2016-2017), Muses (2017), Nocturnes (2017), Shroud (2016) and Mythologies (2022).
Charlotte Mano, who first made a name for herself with her pictorialist portraits of the Portraire series, has continued to assert her unique photographic style over the years. She hunted ghosts by photographing in the dark, she played with the pixels of her camera to give all the grace to the images of her Muses series and she symbolically tried to make the memory of the places of her childhood survive by flying a sheet in landscapes that end up disappearing (Shroud). Charlotte Mano has also sought to hide the faces of her family members behind a black thermal veil, challenging viewers to reveal them themselves with the heat of a lamp or a hand. She still continued to track her family by chasing them at night with her flashlight (Nocturnes). Then, in 2020, she received the HSBC Prize for Photography with her Thank You Mum series, she unveiled an ensemble that is still very intimate but noticeably of another order. This time there was no longer any obstruction to vision: no more veil, no more night, no more artefacts. This is a mother-daughter resistance duo where the outcome known in advance is the death of the mother. Her radical research on intimacy, darkness, the limits of the photographic medium, its simple hypersensitive presence in the world are real commitments that she offers to the viewer.
Charlotte Mano : Ravissements
from June 10 to September 17, 2022
Galerie XII Paris
14 Rue des Jardins Saint-Paul
75004 Paris
www.galeriexii.com
