Until June 16, is held the month of photography of Luxembourg. Among the exhibitions, the work of Corinne Mariaud that we have chosen to show you.
Her FAKE i REAL ME series, made in Asia (Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo), is based on portraits of young women who have gone thru cosmetic surgery and are using makeup, contact lenses, hair coloring to look like their beauty ideal. , and portraits of young men called “Flower Beauty Boys”, they use makeup and have an androgynous appearance. Each model looks directly at the objective, and expresses a strong awareness of his-her appearance and representativeness.
Unlike her previous series, it is no longer the artist who fictionalizes the body in space, but it is her models that embody, through elaborate, perfectionist research, their appearance, the very fiction. The bias of the photographer was to make individual frontal portraits, close together, framed in a very classical way, with a neutral background (often pastel) so that the narration focuses on the features of the faces, the eyes, and the style of the photographer. each. This time the model is the fiction; each one recounts the search for the perfect beauty, and at the same time, one perceives it, this pleasure of being represented, captured, photographed. The choice to use the light box to present some of these clichés further strengthens this quest for perfection, preciousness of the image.
Corinne Mariaud discovers this very strong phenomenon in Asia, which is the place of appearance and aesthetic surgery in society. In Korea, one out of five woman, resort to it to reach a form of ideal beauty, it is the best way to find a better job, a spouse, and to please oneself too. Even if the criteria of beauty meet and still correspond to the same aesthetic references, the models of this series also want to create a new me, a new appearance, which corresponds really genuinely to how the feel inside, even if we are sometimes closer to a character of manga …
In addition, through her latest portraits of young men is added the question of gender, the feminisation with makeup, clothing and sometimes surgery, give these young men a troubling androgynous beauty. That Corinne Mariaud knew how to reinforce, catching them in poses that blur even more the boundaries and the sexual identity.
European Month of Photography 2019
FAKE I REAL ME by Corinne Mariaud
May 23 – June 16
Neumünster Abbey
28 rue Münster
L-2160 Luxembourg
