One, Marie-Pierre Morel, is a photographer, the other, Lou Jeunet, is a filmmaker.
Both had the common desire to take a feminine look at the studio nude, whether male or female.
The photographs taken by the writer Pierre Louÿs of his mistress Marie de Régnier in 1898 are at the origin of the project. They strike with their audacity and their modernity. From behind, sitting, lying, looking straight into the lens or having fun behind her hair, Marie de Regnier is a model that has a say. When Marie invites Pierre to photograph her in the conjugal apartment in the absence of her husband, who is staging? Is it her or is him?
The mystery of these photographs gave birth to a film, Curiosa with Noémie Merlant, Niels Schneider, Benjamin Laverhne and Camellia Jordana.
On the occasion of the theatrical release on April 3, the Sit Down Gallery will present the installations of the director Lou Jeunet in entomology boxes, containing the objects of the film – photo albums, photo novel, poems and small blue pneumatic tube letters, while Marie Pierre Morel unveils a photographic set of studies of nudes preparatory to the film.
The Academy series is a tribute to the classics of the genre: the studio model is regarded as a sculpture, the face disappears to not distract from the body, the form is its own end.
Inspired by the work of pictorial photographers such as Robert Demachy or Edward Steichen, Marie Morel works in the bedroom. The photographer is interested in the decomposition of the movement, variations around the same theme.
The proofs numbered and printed by the artist herself in fine line printing, allowing her to obtain thanks to the quality of the paper and the work of inking a matter on the skin and in the blacks that she would not obtain with a traditional photographic print.
Also included in the exhibition, what Marie-Pierre Morel called the little Nudes taken during the tests made by Lou Jeunet with her actors. Through the contemporary bodies of young actors, we find the poses of the models of the past, the masculine academic nudes, the female odalisques.
Some reproductions of the photographs of Pierre Louÿs of the collection of the BnF are mixed in the exhibition to better admire what Pierre Louÿs named in a letter to his brother George Louis “these small things which one looks at with a passing glance … ”
Marie-Pierre Morel – Curiosa
From March 26 to April 12, 2019
Sit Down Gallery
4 rue Sainte-Anastase
75003 Paris
www.sitdown.fr
