Born in the Pyrenees, in a hippie community, he immediately bathed in the sharing, the “deprivation” chosen or rather the true relationship with nature and her ilk. Ysel quickly leans, of course, towards the limits of existence. Old age, illness, disability, poverty … became his playgrounds. Going to the simplest, at first, he takes as a model his grandfather and maliciously combines his question about old age and his desire to better know his grandfather.
His search for the limits pushes him towards the AP-HP (Public Assistance Hospitals of Paris) where he discovers through his photographs the heat of the bodies and the coldness of the technical acts of the operating theaters. The world of disability is soon knocking at his door with an order from the White Butterflies. His photographs are enriched then with the pain, the joy, the scientific references and the writing which are superimposed.
If the chosen deprivation that he lived during his childhood remained as a DNA in his way of living, the encounter with poverty during his four trips to Africa was, for him, the discovery of another limit of life and society. Since Ysel wanders between the testimony, the reportage, the portrait and the staging, marrying with subtlety the beautiful and the significant.
Two years of study at the school of the GOBELINS will be most useful to tame the light and put into practice the most modern digital techniques. Today, nourished by his previous work, Ysel has taken a new step by combining photographic art with plastic art. Indeed far from reporting, the documentary aspect Ysel enriches his work with overprints and materials in connection with the chosen medium. The paper disappears the metal arrives in its series named “Calliphora”.
(… / …) But where does this word come from? this is the first question that burns our lips. Ysel says it’s a fly, the blue fly that breaks down organic matter, Calliphora “who wears beauty”.
And as a boomerang, the whole universe of this collection reminds us of life, death and the passage. Each photo tells us that we are only vagabonds on this earth. From childhood to old age one would only survive oneself so that in the end, in an eternal movement, what is dead is irremediably transformed into life. “Calliphora” everything is said.
Every moment of our existence is thus swept by the photographer. From procreation, at the end of life the Calliphora works jostle us even in their titles. Nidicus, Passage, Homo ergaster, Dementia, Sinus or Chronos, Amino Acids “tell us the long way of life that goes toward life. Science is at the heart of this reminiscent production, the carefully hammered message that the human being is, like all organic matter, far beyond the spiritual, eternal by its constitution and thanks to this famous blue fly.
From a text by Xavier Beaufils
Ysel Fournet – Calliphora
Until March 2
True Dreams Gallery
6, Rue Dumenge
69004 Lyon
