Lucile Boiron explores and exhausts fragments of flesh, these moments when human nature appears for what it is, that is, perishable. Far from making an inventory of the feeling of revulsion, she questions the body’s biological truth, and attempts a photographic answer to the issue of good and bad taste.
Bodies, to which we no longer pay attention, here remind us of their true condition: territories where states are shared, yet unique, bearing traces of stories that the skin alone is able to understand.
Decomposition: when something that is already dead parodies life, when a repugnant tissue is left to rot. Flesh has its own logic: it sucks and swallows, engulfs, rejects itself and eventually disintegrates, transforming from solid to liquid state. The photographer’s still lives wander between these two states, indeterminate as are bodily uids.
They gure a visual feast, a cannibal sight, the pleasure to tear and to maul. The women Lucile Boiron photographed devour the world from its nerve center. The close-ups lead us to the very core of our origins. These scenes have taken place from time immemorial with inexplicable delight, involving hands, mandibles and every single muscle. Each of these women relish in discovering savagery over and over again.
Here, the socialized body revolts, relentlessly. It reveals itself as both the seat of reality and the subject of photography. It becomes a language, accumulates inscriptions. Pleasure and vermin are the horizon of our daily lives fraught with humors. On and under the skin, where it encounters the meat, swarms of strange entities proliferate. Lucile Boiron searches for the itches, the ushing skin, the varicose veins… In the real world there is no such thing as scarlet skin, only emanations of it, which are then interpreted as signs. Those signs we reject in disgust, because we consider them degrading.
Entrails, raw meat, decomposing fruit: these images haunt and revolt us. There is an ambivalent seduction to ugliness and repulsion, arousing our desire for the animality and the morbid pleasure found in contemplation.
What emerges on the skin, against what morality teaches us, does not result from internal disorder or in icted punishment. Photography, however, nds it somewhat dif cult to face scabs, discharges and scars, for it only sees them as the mirror of the soul. Poor Job covered in ulcers knows the price of his redemption. Driven by a psychological approach to the body’s representation, we are quick to consider it guilty and improper. Wrinkles, spots, calluses and smallpox scars are thought to be metaphorical realities, indisputable marks of faults committed and shamefully admitted by their possessors.
Here, the body is as real as it can get. For this is how men live…
François Cheval, June 2019
Lucile Boiron is the recipient of the 2019 Libraryman Award.
Lucile Boiron has just joined the modds agency.
Lucile Boiron : Womb
Libraryman Editions
First edition of 500 copies, with fold-out poster. Special edition of 30 copies, numbered, in paperboard slipcase, screen printed in red, with signed original print. Choice of 2 prints.
20,5 cm x 27,5 cm. 48 pages. 35 color plates. Offset printed clothbound hardcover. Linen thread bound. Red headband. Authentic tip-in image on front cover with typography on spine and back cover in red foil.
ISBN 978–91–88113–31–3
