“Barely out of the exhibition at the Musée Chagall in Nice a few months ago, where Natacha Lesueur exhibited photographs like compassed relics of a vision of exoticism, sort of revisited postcards of French Polynesia savagely distorted by the gazes of tourists and colonists, we are now faced with recent photographs and ceramics in a very strange state. Talk about mild excitement.

From the Galerie Eva Vautier to the Galerie de la Marine, we are torn by what characterizes Natacha Lesueur’s photographs: a set of powerful, violent sensations caught up by an art of scenography and color, tinged with humor, pleasure and lightness. We move from sensations of attraction and repulsion to fascination, then from transgression to poetry. Realism and mystery, modesty and shamelessness, discrepancy and drama, seductive charm and disgust with materials, are all telescoped. Stereotypes are made on and for the human body and its image, and end up working against it, but they generate beams of creativity through subversive processes. All the tragedies of clichés are energies and antagonistic impulses, as vital as they are deadly. Between trash and glamour, the models hold sculptural star poses that would be too impeccable, too Hollywood-like, if the outrageous make-up or faded, faded colors didn’t underline a sad, absent, mawkish or disillusioned expression that casts advertising or film photography in a different light. No Photoshop for the bedroom, no exfoliation for what are described as dermatological imperfections, genetic manufacturing defects, but on the contrary, light and precision for the details that configure our own DNA.
The smooth, perfect world of glossy paper doesn’t exist, and the women who are its objects, highlighted against a black background, are bursting at the seams under the weight of their image. Oversized saucers, sculpted plastoc hair colors, blowtorch burns on headdresses, holes, blisters and scars disturb an invasive order like oil. There’s always something wrong here. Politically incorrect. A confused order, if we didn’t see, in a fine, refined, extremely well-dosed way, the balance of the flaws: the hair abandoned on the garment, the veinule on the leg, the road network of the breasts of a pregnant woman who doesn’t normally pose in this intimate situation, the sudden appearance of a bra strap, the round belly that pierces the garment. Intimacy is muted here, where everything in principle is done to erase it and personality along with it.

Starting with landmark photographs from 1996 (I’m reminded of her interventions on the body, such as the nails sculpted in the shape of spearheads or arrows), the artist’s quasi-prehistory, here is a woman on all fours, wearing a short, tight-fitting evening gown. She would be almost obscene if her mules hadn’t been too small, and if the truncated, headless body hadn’t disrupted the reading of the pose through anonymity and, finally, if the imprint of absent stockings hadn’t revealed their suggested presence, their marks. Once again, everything contributes to bringing down the magnificence of a classic black-and-white aesthetic that would be unbreathable if a prepubescent anorexic girl had been chosen instead of this model. Anything beyond our control allows for projections on a human scale. It seems that in Natacha Lesueur’s world, the incongruity and vagaries of the skin (we’re not fooled, they’re also controlled): its grain, its complexion, its firmness and shine, its looseness, its fluff, bring together a whole vocabulary, a register capable of restoring the body’s own expression and relative authenticity, through the interplay of light and shadow.

Photographs with gray, black and white are not black and white photographs. They are color photographs of blacks and whites. If we take the most recent ones, we can see at the bottom a touch of flesh color that could be called “painting”, reminding us that we are indeed in the world of color and skin. In addition to the great themes of portraiture and still life, these photo-paintings borrow from painting the art of composition and introduce an art of decomposition, using perishable organic materials such as foodstuffs, flowers or the body, a kind of return to nature that is used here for the other purpose of making living images. Photo-sculptures revisit the art of statuary, as nineteenth-century artists did in the art of cemeteries (Staglieno remains the illustrious illustration). Here, the portrait-bust backs feature hair that looks as if it’s been molded from clay, like something out of ancient archaeology. Everything seems frozen, molded, but the materials and lighting lend these pieces a vital power that is utterly convincing. Similarly, we read the pain of pushing the endless quest for illusory beauty, formatted in the photographs that include imprints, even if only of flowers embedded in the skin of arms and hands, as in the photograph of the woman with the veil, with its strangely wise, imperturbable attitude. Interventions on the skin itself as a graphic surface, which in this case is not body art.

Color explodes in this stunning series of photographs, echoing the white-skinned Brazilian singer-dancer of the “40s, Carmen Miranda, who had her moment of glory in the Hollywood spotlight and in American society’s longing to conquer Latin countries. By quenching her thirst for exoticism against a backdrop of samba and fantasy, happiness and fake parties, and by extrapolating her view of blackness in white, the star system has wrung the life out of a woman’s image. This image was sustained by alcohol and drugs until her untimely death. The consequence of two-bit tropicalism alongside the nascent negritude (Duke Ellington and Sidney Bechet, Césaire and Senghor) against a backdrop of racism. Extraordinary casting of models who bring beauty to places where we least expect it: a mawkish smile, an empty gaze, a big belly, a bit of chair that pops out from under a fabric that needs hemming, a shy dancer’s gesture, props that remind us of an architecture’s fragility and the fragility of the world. Then, as an allusion to death, rotting fruit here, or withered, glaucous flowers for women who are more vases than jugs, or on a body with appetizing breasts, form a backdrop into which the model blends. The photographs feature faded, weary star substitutes, grimaces, ham-handed chattemite smiles and mimics, sad, absent gazes, faces with sometimes androgynous angles, childish, jaded trompe-l” œil smiles.

In this anthology of dynamic proposals, we catch a crooked earring in two photographs with blue backdrops, into which the static model slips (have you ever poked your head into those cardboard fair backdrops to get immortalized?). The softness of half-open lips, hair redefined in fresh paint, a rose painted directly on the skin, a back in a front dress, in other words, a model on the front and then on the back in the front of the dress. The range of techniques abounds, in a festival of vintage colors and colorization, fading and overexposure, right up to posters showing a cibachrome Mediterranean landscape as the reverse side of an overdone décor (its azure-blue sky zebra-striped like a Haribo candy bar by the tracery of airplane engines, its lush vegetation, its spectacular sunsets). The landscape serves as a backdrop for earthenware featuring illustrious personalities and women, symbols of an absurdly dated pomp. They rest on pedestals aligned on the horizon of a lost paradise.

How can we not then travel to the outfits of the revolutionary Frida Kahlo, adored by American collectors in her folkloric outfits laden with jewels, flowers and leaves, with monkeys, dogs and deer, or African statuettes (Diego Rivera collected them) and claiming an art of staging her life and body, in her painting as in the poses offered to photographers such as Murray, drawing their origins from traditional Mexican culture. I’m reminded of Josephine Baker, of the revue noire, and her affinity with cubists and jazzmen, of her torrid, comic Banana dance of the 20s. Both exalted the characteristics of what was considered wild at the time, in artistic processes of which they remained masters.
This is not the case with Carmen Miranda, who we might wonder if she isn’t, in a way, a replica of the Côte d’Azur, or of the stars who were victims like them, caught up in their own game of smoke and mirrors. Carmen Miranda and her baroque outfits, captured in exotic settings of rhinestones and sequins, an icon manufactured by a mercantile, expansionist system that crushes singularities, joins, with her enormous baskets of fruit, the register of food vocabulary dear/chair to Natacha Lesueur (the aspics that cover the skulls, like paintings with pallets of food). Deconstructions and constructions are pretexts for the jubilation inherent in this kind of creation, which, through its incredible expression of freedom, offers our gaze a world that’s a little more digestible.
Reading Natacha Lesueur’s photographs with the grids of sculpture and painting opens up a wide range of perspectives. The antagonistic forces that emerge from her work give what is dying out in the world a positive energy and the means for its renewal. ”

Sophie Braganti

Find the author and his article on aicafrance

photographs Natacha Lesueur :

Carine, 2015, 100 x 80 cm, Analogue photograph, Lambda print on ilfoflex

Untitled, 2015, 60 x 60 cm, Analogue photograph, Baryta print