The fourth edition of the PORTRAIT(S) festival of Vichy opens its doors today. Until 4th September Vichy is an outpost of today’s photography for a season and is presenting to the public some exhibitions centred exclusively around the art of the portrait. This new edition is showing nine artists whose exhibitions are taking place simultaneously in the city centre and outside it, in the open air. L’Oeil de la Photographie brings you the work of one photographer from the programme every day. Today, focus on « Milo » by Nicolas Comment.
Leaping from the silky folds of curtains, ruby nails, a hand set in red like a scarlet gem, the lure of a body that announces its presence just as it disrobes. For six years, French photographer and composer-songwriter Nicolas Comment has been putting together a photographic blazon of the body of Milo, his lover and muse who appears and disappears in the spiral of a desire forever new. Set against backgrounds in Tangier, Berlin, Barcelona, Brussels or Paris, the couple replay their loving in camera.
From hotel to hotel, from rooms to dark alleys, from gardens to patios, from belvederes to medinas, Milo hides and undresses, wraps and coils herself, always present, always beyond grasping, incarnate and evanescent. She rushes into the dark room, all the better to mottle herself with hot, sensual colour that electrifies the soft-eyed photographer. Nicolas Comment plays with Milo’s body as if it were a musical score. He declines the Goldberg Variations of fetishism. He links her exquisite behind and her suspender belt, the nervous curve of her foot and her shiny shoe, her slender hips and her silk sheath dress. He unveils the blazons of a body that is unique and at one and the same time the emblem of the eternal feminine. He is the teller of a quivering, intimate tale. In these erotically charged photographs, where the satin of the curtains and the velvet of the cushions are an extension of the silk of her hair, what we see is less a striptease than a double disrobing, that of the model and the photographer, who frees himself beneath our very eyes of his dizziness and his obsessions.
FESTIVAL
PORTRAIT(S)
From June 10th to September 4th, 2016
Milo
Nicolas Comment
Centre Culturel Valery-Larbaud
03200 Vichy
France
https://www.ville-vichy.fr/agenda/festival-portraits-2016
http://www.nicolascomment.com
