Articles / Reviews
PHANTOM GESTURES
In the »death dance« series (»Le Désir«, 2007), the Marilyn Monroe persona is busy »playing out« on the stage archetypal emotions, desire, sensuality, loss, longing, with a black-clothed »stand-in« partner. Shot with a Leica and sharp lenses, the image now is grainy and painterly. The nature of the dummy isn’t ambiguous anymore, but exhibited openly for what it is. The couple casts a shadow in the background turning their dance into a threatening embrace mixing eroticism and death. In this silent duel, it becomes clear that sex has become the last rampart against Death the Ripper.
Closing the cycle inaugurated by the dark gothic photographs, the last series (this time a digital one) re-enacts theatrically the twilight of the ghosts and the agony of the analogue. Clothed in white and practically indistinguishable from her own dummy, the photographer-actor vainly keeps pumping life in her dwindling creature.