The project Les Invisibles is the result of an encounter between two modes of expression: one photographic, the other pencil drawn . This meshing of image and drawing has its origin in the desire to illuminate some of Julien Mignot’s photographs taken at the Promenade de la Croisette in Cannes: black and white portraits of celebrities caught in an intimate setting (yet fully clothed). With her pencil strokes, Camille Rousseau composes a formal response to figurative subjects, starting with landscapes and then turning to increasingly abstract motifs.
Her method is iterative: Camille uses carbon paper which she places in her sketchbook. She then proceeds to draw blindly on the black surface. And from the darkness emerges light: white traces that seem to weave friendly halos around the subjects’ faces and envelop them in sacred meaning, similar to those crowning the heads of Byzantine saints. Thus the portrait becomes an icon (from the Greek, image).
The series expands, slowly developing towards abstraction in order to bring out the aura of the portrayed figures and, by means of drawing, reveal the stream of their consciousness, as well as something of their souls. This freedom of representation of a face viewed as a vast terrain of projection is the very essence of portraiture. The portrait doubles: first, it is the gaze of the photographer; then, the graphic artist unleashes her perception and projection. Golshifteh Farahani seems to be looking out a window, lost in her thought. This is how Julien captured her. Using line drawing, Camille seems to deposit a bird over the subject’s shoulder. Fantasy and imagination, drawing takes photography towards a less realistic realm. It is a manifestation of the unease, the unknown, and the intangible in the portrait.
After cinema, the artists’ new series turns to music with 15 original portraits, including Murat, Etienne Daho, Patti Smith, Lana del Rey, John Cale, Izia… The creative process is identical, but enhanced with a new technique: drawing advances across the page to the sound of a piece by a given musician. “The composer is first of all a calligrapher,” said Igor Stravinsky. Like Claude Melin’s musical calligraphers, Camille Rousseau lets her gestures be guided by the rhythm of the music and composes an invisible score to Julien Mignot’s portraits, endowing them with mute, yet living, speech.
Léa Chauvel-Lévy
Julien Mignot & Camille Rousseau, Les Invisibles
Until February 16, 2017
Superette Film Production Gallery
104, rue du Faubourg Poissonière
75010 Paris
