fotofever 2019
Einzelausstellung | Gilles Lorin
In 2019, fotofever is highlighting the vitality of the French art scene and the contemporary use of older techniques to celebrate the 180th anniversary of the invention of photography in France and we are very excited that Gilles’ work will be part of this edition.
Born in 1973 in Aix-en-Provance, he grew up in the French Alps before moving to the United States at the age of fifteen. Educated as an art historian and archaeologist both in France and the US and working several years as an expert for Asian Art, photography became his profession after a serious accident and a very long hospital stay. Today Gilles lives with his wife and his twin daughters in the South of Germany.
Gilles belongs to a group of contemporary photographers who make use of early photographic processes. One almost inevitably feels reminded of pictorialism, transported into the 21st century.
His signature is his printing technique. Gilles neither documents nor travels around the world in search of the best snapshot. His photographs are not meant to be contemporary documents. Instead Gilles creates painterly complete works of art. He arranges, composes, plays with light and leaves nothing to chance before he captures a sketch with the camera. The real work follows in the darkroom where he experiments with chemicals, papers and techniques until he has found the desired way to depict his motif. This process results in impressively beautiful prints of outstanding quality.
In Paris, we will show a selection of prints from his entire body of work, including platinum palladium prints from the series Portraits, Divin and Memento Mori. Some are on strong Arches, some on wafer thin Japanese Gampi and others are backed with fine goldleaf. An emphasis is on his newest series Portraits of Dao, in which he used the cyanotype technique for some motifs with equally impressive results, creating an incredibly luminous, flawless deep Prussian blue.
