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What’s the Use of a Mask When You Have Nothing to Hide?

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Since he was twenty-five, photographer Hervé Szydlowski has explored the sumptuous and pulsatile beauty of nudist bodies, beyond the taboos that freeze and harden suffocating prejudices, strangling fears, stifling prudishness.

He does not do nudes as one would approach a well-defined genre of photography. Doing nudes would be asking his models to undress to be photographed, but that is not the case here. The model is already nude. Quite the opposite, he asks them to don a mask. A malicious touch of irony? The zest of a poetic attempt?

First and foremost, Hervé Szydlowski shows a state of mind, ferreted in the folds of bodies or the curves of skin, in order to unearth the beauty, the truth, sometimes rebellious and damaged, which challenges, exults, and disturbs. It is the unique testimony of a wild anthropology where the human tries to find him- or herself while nude, where the photographer captures this insatiable and fragile desire for freedom.

The mask is a cathartic function for all ages of humanity and in all civilizations. The mask hides, intrigues, makes us laugh. The mask excites, frightens, cures. The mask dances, caricatures, exaggerates. The mask deceives, embellishes, jostles. The mask establishes power and frees emotion.

Putting a mask, especially a Venetian Carnival mask, on a nude body is like grafting the inconceivable, the grotesque, the burlesque, creating an ambiguous schemer, a glaring and dramatic contrast.

And what if the mask were here to show and no longer to hide? Showing that these very different bodies, far from vanity and conceit, are full of incredible life, proud and peaceful, clear and minimal. Abandoning appearances just to be. That is the gamble of these nude and masked humans who play with accessory, knowing well where the essential really is.

Renaud Poillevé 

Renaud Poillevé is an author and a painter who lives and works in Paris.

 

Hervé Szydlowski, Masques
From April 4 through 8, 2018
Art Paris, Art Fair – Galerie Pascal Vanhoeck
Grand Palais
3 Avenue du Général Eisenhower
75008 Paris
France

www.artparis.com

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