After a long search for a suitable medium, Philippe Ordioni chose photography. It has become his language. His encounter with the visual artist Rodia Bayginot led him to create over 2000 portraits. This in turn helped him refine his focus and create, with the assistance of his daughter, Claire Ordioni, a series of baroque portraits, at once unsettling and funny, with a whiff of expressionist or sci-fi cinema (but far from the unpalatable Star Wars saga).
This primitivist photographer of the future imagines beings dispossessed of their own identity, who are saved by drowning in schizophrenic grotesqueness only to face a world that is itself mentally and psychically unhinged. Simulacrum is the answer to illusion. The baroque turns into visual music (a sort of “Bartoque”) that endlessly supplements itself. As they chose their models in their encounters with different people, Claire does their makeup and Philippe poses them. There is a lot of prep work as each model does their best to embody “their” monster in an alchemical bond with the photographer.
If you take him at his word, Philippe Ordioni is yet to find his perfect model; to explain himself, he cites Diane Arbus: “I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.” As he finalizes or completes his Portraits baroques, his “Baroxisms” push the limits of madness since the body is drawn into it head on. The work is always “in progress.” Everything about it is captivating, fantastic. The world of Delicatessen comes to mind, but Ordioni’s images are more dreamlike. Little by little, the work is making headway. It has been defended, among others, by Bernard Plossu: even though his own aesthetics is far removed from Ordioni’s, he was able to recognize a kindred spirit. A master of disassociation, Ordioni invariably succeeds at creating an effect of dark wonder: beneath each mask we can surprise a piece of ourselves.
EXPOSITION
Icones baroques
Philippe Ordioni
Du 6 au 16 mai 2016
Palais de l’Archevêché
13200 Arles
France
http://www.fepn-arles.com/expositions.html
