Thierry Balanger: Insolentes beautés

Les Douches la Galerie is pleased to present Insolentes beautés by Thierry Balanger, the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. For nearly thirty years, his work has explored the intimate connections between the body and photography. Through a radical process liberated from the camera, Thierry Balanger directly engages the materiality of the body with that of photosensitive paper, giving rise to images in which physical presence becomes imprint, trace, and experience. The exhibition thus highlights a practice that is both performative and introspective, in which the photographic gesture becomes a space for revelation and self-transformation.

According to Adonis, “The body is a universe — its space is the face. The face is not the mask of anything.” But if the body is a universe, photography is equally so. Or, more precisely, it is through the universe of the photographic that the universe of the body can become aware, without a mask, of the extent of its territory, of its existence and its essence; in other words: become incarnate. The entire body of work of Thierry Balanger, for nearly three decades now, bears witness to this. For while the body has no beginning outside itself, it may nonetheless unfold and expand, in all its measure and excess, upon the very surface of photographic paper, which in return offers a direct, immediate imprint from which there is no turning back. For these are not literally [self-]portraits of a body, a face, a being, or an identity, but unquestionably an all-encompassing contact followed by an in extenso transfer, skin upon skin: the epidermis of a body — human, animal, vegetal — and its humours versus the sensitive epidermis of the silver salts embedded in photographic paper. Thus the figures and forms of appearance become nothing less than the pure material presences of a tangible and effective reality. (...)

Text: Marc Donnadieu